The membership of Local Media Association includes some amazing companies. Here is the second installment of our new series highlighting their success stories, featuring Anchorage Daily News in Alaska.

We are a media company with our first issue in 1946 but have been under a new owner since September of 2017, when Ryan Binkley and some of his family bought it out of bankruptcy from Alice Rogoff. McClatchy owned us before Rogoff.

We have a print circulation of around 10,000 and a digital circulation of around 18,500. We have around 80 employees and cover Anchorage and greater Alaska. We also own a business publication, the Alaska Journal of Commerce, and two rural weeklies, The Arctic Sounder and the Bristol Bay Times.

What was a major revenue success of your local media company in 2023?

Andy Pennington, publisher

Digital subscriptions continue to lead our year-over-year revenue growth.

We revamped our agency website and started a small search engine marketing campaign in 2023 for our digital agency services. That has led to some good revenue growth by landing a few big accounts. We get 5-7 viable leads per month and close a few new accounts here and there. Some of those have ended up being large accounts for our agency.

What have been some recent journalism accomplishments you are proud of or have received awards for?

We won a Pulitzer Prize for Public Service in 2020 for our “Lawless” series. It was a year-long examination of the failures of the criminal justice system in communities across Alaska. The series was in partnership with ProPublica.

What are your company’s top three priorities moving into the future?

Outside of focusing on producing great journalism, which is at our core, we have been focusing on and will continue to focus on digital subscriptions, events and digital advertising revenue efforts. We will also continue to look at philanthropy and partnerships as they come up. This has been our focus since 2017 when we were purchased. We will continue to look at other diversification opportunities as they come up and fit our core strengths. Journalism is at the heart of what we do but finding ways to support that through those main categories will continue to be our focus.

Why did you join LMA, or what do you get out of being a part of LMA?

LMA allows us to hear from others in the industry about how things are moving, shifting or changing in our business. It is happening fast, and LMA allows us to stay close to the changes. They provide great resources and the opportunity to talk to our peers and hear about best practices. LMA has some great staff who are always here to help us. Sponsored content, business model transformation, philanthropy and much more are just a few of the resources they have to help us figure those out.

What keeps you up at night about the local media industry?

Our business model, AI, small publications going away, our reputation (with news consumers) and the continued fragmentation of ad dollars.

What gives you hope about the local media industry?

In the last few years, it was the willingness of people to pay for journalism (good news).