Episode 496 - Can Alaska solve its financial problems?
Larry Persily moved to Alaska in 1976 to buy the Wrangell Sentinel. In this episode he recounts a long career covering logging, fishing, and Alaska's dependency on oil. We also discusses Alaska’s fiscal challenges, the Permanent Fund dividend, declining oil production, debates over taxes and public services, and how social media and changing business models are threatening local news and community life.
On Step Alaska — Interview with Larry Persily
On Step Alaska: Larry, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for being on.
Persily: Thank you. This is only the third podcast I've ever been on in my life.
On Step Alaska: Are you familiar with them? Do you listen to any of them?
Persily: I'm not a podcast person. I'm not familiar with them. I kind of like the structure that my life has when I know, oh, that radio program's done at 9 o'clock Sunday — I've got to work my life around it. So it's just like having a calendar. But eventually I'll get into podcasts.
On Step Alaska: So you moved up to Alaska in the 70s. What prompted the move?
Persily: May 26th, 1976. My late wife and I were both working for a newspaper in Chicago. And one night sitting around, I think waiting for pizza to be delivered, we were reading a journalism trade magazine, just kind of killing time, reading the classified ads, and found the newspaper in Wrangell for sale. We weren't looking to move to Alaska. We weren't looking to buy a newspaper. But it seemed interesting. And like I say, waiting for pizza. So I thought, well, there's a phone number here, I'll call them. How much does it cost?
And back in '76, they didn't have direct dial long distance yet in Wrangell. So it was after hours and the switchboard in town was closed. The Thunderbird Hotel was where it rang, because that's where the switchboard was with the plugs and the cords. Anyway, Francis answered. I said, I'm trying to reach Jamie Bryson with the Sentinel. Well, he's not at the office now, it's closed. Okay, can you switch me to his home? Well, he's not there. He's over at so-and-so's having dinner. Because of course Francis knew everything. So he patched me in and I talked to Jamie. After a little bit, we thought, well, gee, it's $6,000 down. We have $6,000 between us. What else are we doing? So in five weeks' time, we quit our jobs, sold everything, got married, packed, and moved to Alaska.
On Step Alaska: That's kind of similar to a lot of Alaska stories. It seems like during that time, the 70s and 80s, there was a lot to come to Alaska for. My parents were looking at the back of an alumni magazine for the University of Northern Colorado, and there was a teacher placement opportunities section. One of them was in Klawock, Alaska. It was the same sort of thing — the kids are young enough that if we move, they're not going to be missing their friends. I was five and my brother was eight. So they packed up the station wagon and moved to Klawock, Alaska without ever having been to Prince of Wales Island. There were six miles of paved road. Pretty wild.
Persily: Yeah, we did think about buying it sight unseen and then thought, no, we better go look. So we took a three-day weekend — it just took a day to get there, a day to stay. And anyway, we came and looked. By then, we had pretty much decided that as long as we didn't hate it, we'd stay. I remember the owner picked us up at the airport in Wrangell and took us to the office. We drove whatever it was, a mile and a half, got downtown. Well, we didn't know it was downtown. I said, well, are we in town? He said, yeah, this is downtown. Back then, Front Street wasn't paved. It was rustic looking, but it grows on you. There wasn't like an initial panic of, what am I doing here? No, the panic came when we actually moved. Back then, there was no through jet service from Seattle to Wrangell. So we flew Seattle to Ketchikan and then the owner had arranged for a friend to meet us with a plane and take us to Wrangell. Well, I grew up in Chicago. Planes are big. So we land in Ketchikan, get off the jet. This is before TSA, so you're just wandering around. I don't see a plane. And this guy comes out of the terminal and says, hi, are you Larry and Leslie? Yeah. Well, I'm Chuck Traylor, I'm going to take you to Wrangell. I said, where's your plane? He points at the Cessna 185 on floats. And I thought, oh God, that's not a plane. But we got everything fitted into it and got there okay.
On Step Alaska: That's awesome. So when you first came up, what was the journalism like? It was kind of a hot time — there was a lot of things to write about with the oil and fishing. A lot of the journalists that moved up in the 70s had plenty of stuff to write about. So what were the first journalistic goals when you got here?
Persily: Well, in '76, the Trans-Alaska oil pipeline was still being built. It didn't start flowing until February 20, 1977. Timber was still big — logging camps all over, the sawmills, the pulp mills. Timber and fishing really dominated Southeast. There was a cannery in Wrangell that did the traditional one-pound salmon cans, and also an institutional four-pound can that went to hospitals and schools. Everything was focused on the cannery in the summer and the logging camps — flying provisions and workers out to the camps. The oil was still almost a year away and the money hadn't started flowing from it yet. Though certainly a lot of people from Southeast took jobs on the pipeline because they paid well.
On Step Alaska: So once the oil started flowing, you've been involved in writing about oil and gas for years now, decades. In that first period, was there a sense that this was going to sustain Alaska's future forever? If we look at now, so much of our financial issues stem from maybe some of the attitudes that started way back then — that this is going to be a forever thing and we're going to be flush with money for the foreseeable future. What was it about that early time that made Alaskans seem so excited about a boom that would never end?
Persily: Well, in November 1976, Alaskans, by a two-to-one margin, approved a constitutional amendment to create the Permanent Fund, saying we're going to take some of the oil money and set it aside because we're going to need it someday. No oil lasts forever. So looking back on it — brilliant move, great thing we did. But even with saving a bunch of money for the Permanent Fund, we were still awash in oil dollars as Prudhoe Bay ramped up production. The state had a lot of unmet needs — new schools, roads, harbors, airports — and did a lot of good things with it. But we developed a mentality, I think, an over-reliance on it. And in 1980, the legislature voted to eliminate the income tax and the business gross receipts tax, which were both sort of the foundation of the fiscal plan until oil started coming. In hindsight, I'll say it — I think it was dumb. But that's what they did in 1980. They didn't need the money. Not thinking, well, eventually we'll need the money and we'll just put the tax back. You don't put a tax back. My God, people will string you up.
So moving to 2026, we've had more than two generations in Alaska that have never paid a tax to the state. We've had more than two generations who have gotten a check from the state every year with the Permanent Fund Dividend that started in 1982. And I'm not condemning the dividend, but at some point, as oil production is now about one quarter of what it was at its peak — peak 1988, 2 million barrels a day, we're at about 450,000 barrels a day — it'll pick up as a couple of new big fields come online, but we're never going to get back anywhere remotely close to what we were. So less production, higher costs to produce oil, less tax revenue. We have several hundred thousand more people in Alaska than we did in the 70s. Costs of educating and providing services are higher.
I think also having some kind of tax on the state level — besides an income tax, which is my preference — you'd get some money from the non-resident workers. About 25% of the oil industry workforce is non-resident, even higher — I think 37% in mining. They come, they use the services, and they go home and don't pay anything. So to answer the question, I think an income tax would diversify our revenue sources so we're not just dependent on the price of oil, and begin to address the needs that have been unmet as we've been really tight on finances.
On Step Alaska: Two of the things that get thrown around: one is, why can't we just ramp up oil production? And two, do the oil companies have such a sweet deal that we could make them pay more? That way everything else can stay the same — we just drill more or produce more or make the oil companies pay their fair share. Why don't those things end up happening?
Persily: Well, in terms of ramping up production, the state can't do anything. The land's available to lease, we give out permits — it's up to companies to make the investment. We do have a couple of big new fields coming online. There's one called Pikka — P-I-K-K-A. The majority owner and developer is a company called Santos, which is actually based in Australia. Their partner is Repsol, a Spanish oil and gas company. I don't know how many billions of dollars it's taken to develop Pikka, but they expect to start producing sometime this summer. There's another one under construction, probably won't be online for another three years or so — that's called Willow. ConocoPhillips is developing that. Between Willow and Pikka, you could see another couple hundred thousand barrels a day. Substantial, yes, but not what we had. Willow, if I remember right, is an $8 or $9 billion investment.
So the state has always encouraged development. But you've got to find companies with deep pockets who are willing to say, I can find the oil, I know I can produce it and make money off of it — and that's an $8 or $9 billion gamble. There was a field about 25 years ago called Badami. BP developed it. They spent, I don't know, a billion bucks — probably two or three billion in today's dollars. They found it, they developed it, they thought it would flow lots of oil. Well, the plumbing just doesn't work. The sand keeps essentially clogging up the drill bit. So sometimes they can do all the engineering, the exploration, spend billions, and it just doesn't work.
So you've got to find companies willing to spend billions. And you can only work up on the slope in the winter — you can't work in the summer, so it's not year-round. A company like Conoco, every year the management looks at: we've got this prospect in Alaska, and this one in Texas, or this one in Oklahoma, or this one in the North Sea. What has the most likelihood of success, the lowest risk, the bigger payback? That's what they're going to pick.
So to answer the tax question, yeah, we could raise taxes, but raise it too high and you risk them picking somewhere else. And there's no magic number — there just isn't.
On Step Alaska: How good are these companies at being clean about this? Obviously the United States has much higher environmental standards than a lot of other countries. So there is an impact on ecosystems, but how good are these companies — and maybe how much has the technology improved over the last 40 years?
Persily: Well, sure, there've been accidents, there've been spills. Certainly the Exxon Valdez stands out. But generally, I'd say Alaska's standards are stricter than elsewhere. Take natural gas, for example. When you drill a hole, you produce oil, natural gas, and water — in most cases they all come up the same pipe. In Alaska's case, they separate it out, put the oil in the pipeline and sell it. The natural gas they re-inject, the water they re-inject. In Texas, the laws are pretty lax. If you don't want to spend the money to re-inject the natural gas and there's no pipeline to move it to market, you can get permission from the state of Texas to vent or flare your gas — just burn it off into the atmosphere, which is pretty bad for global warming. Texas set a record in 2019 for venting or flaring because as they were building up oil production, you just get gas with it and they didn't have enough pipelines. It wasn't worth it — just burn off or vent the gas. Last time I looked, I think 2024, Texas was still flaring several billion cubic feet of gas worth about $500 million a year, just literally up in smoke, because they could get away with it and the oil was so profitable. Well, that's Texas. You can't do that in Alaska. We're better, but people have got to remember — it's oil and gas. The risk is always there.
On Step Alaska: So you wrote about this a lot, and then you took on some advisory or consulting work. You've met with people in D.C. over the last 20 or so years. What types of things have you been asked to advise on or give insight on?
Persily: Yeah, I'd say I attempted to influence. I'm not sure I succeeded. I was never a consultant. I had a couple of different D.C. jobs — three, actually. One, I worked in the governor's office in Washington, D.C. in 2007 and 2008. Most states have a governor's office in D.C. to work on federal issues. So I worked in the state of Alaska's D.C. office on oil and gas, fiscal, tax, telecommunications, transportation, and Arctic issues. Then I went back from 2010 to 2015 to run a federal agency that had been created to help coordinate all the other federal agencies that would be working on an Alaska North Slope natural gas pipeline. People have been talking about that since the 70s, and we're still talking about it in 2026 — it still hasn't gone ahead. I actually closed the office when the government and I both agreed — people just said, look, there's no project, let's just close this down.
And then when Mary Peltola was first elected to Congress in August 2022, she asked if I'd come back and help her through the end of that year just to set up the office, work on some policy issues, try to help her — this was all new to her. So I went back for four months in 2022 to help just get things started, come up with some policy papers, and meet with constituents so she could go be a freshman legislator and not have to worry about meeting everyone who came in the door.
On Step Alaska: What have you seen change since the early 2000s? When logging went out in Southeast Alaska, that was a huge economic issue. There's been a transition to tourism, but financially the state really needs revenue beyond what tourism provides locally. It seems like a dose of reality has descended on Alaska in the 2000s.
Persily: Well, the state never made much money off logging. It was for the community — sales tax, property tax, jobs. I mean, look at what's called the unrestricted general fund budget. That's the money that comes in that the legislature can argue about how to spend. There's a lot of federal money for roads, airports, food stamp programs, but you've got to spend it on those things. The unrestricted money, depending on how oil prices are going and the Permanent Fund earnings, is about 65% of the state budget from oil this year — higher because the president started the trade war and oil prices are up — but generally oil is going to be 25-30% of the revenue. All the other taxes — alcohol, tobacco, motor fuel, non-oil and gas corporate taxes, fish tax, everything else — total about 7-8% of state revenues. Timber, mining — I don't want to say $400 or $500 million is pipsqueak, but if you're looking at a $6 billion general fund and you look at all the other economic activity, it's pretty small.
People refer to it as the Alaska disconnect — you start a new oil company, find oil, great, we get a lot of money. But if you start a new window manufacturing plant, hotel, fish plant, anything else with a lot of employees, you're going to need services for that business and the employees. And because there's no state sales tax, no state property tax except on oil and gas, no state income tax, you could have situations where there's so much activity, so many employees, so many services that those people need, but not any revenue to the state to pay for it. It's a loser for the state. Now yes, Ketchikan would have sales tax, property tax. But at the state level, we don't really get anything from economic activity unless it's a barrel of oil.
On Step Alaska: Yeah, I think that's one of the things that people look around at in the summer and think, man, if we're getting 1.8 million tourists off cruise ships, how are we in any sort of financial problem? Because it seems like we're filled beyond the brim with tourism. But that's a very, very small drop in the bucket when it comes to revenue that the state can use. And even back in 2016, part of the Permanent Fund check was — I don't want to say taken, but...
Persily: Governor Walker vetoed part of the Permanent Fund dividend that year because, well, more of the money was needed to keep the lights on. You can't issue dividends if the check's going to bounce. So yeah, he did that in 2016. On tourism — it's a good point. 1.6 million passengers in Ketchikan and Juneau this year, a lot of sales tax revenue, no question about it. The state gets a per-passenger tax on cruise ships and then shares that with the municipalities. For example, the capital budget that the Senate Finance Committee just released this week in Juneau uses $9.15 million of basically that passenger fee revenue to electrify the cruise ship dock in Ketchikan so ships can run off electricity instead of burning fuel at the dock. So much of the money the state does get from the cruise industry goes back into spending for things that help the industry — or in this case, clean up the air in Ketchikan.
On Step Alaska: So if people say the state is in dire financial straits, why can't we just cut things? There's been talk about right-sizing schools in Alaska, and the Base Student Allocation hasn't gone up permanently and substantially for over 10 years. With inflation over that time, it's been gutting schools. Regardless of how well-run individual school districts are, across the state schools are closing and massive layoffs are happening. It seems like we've gone past right-sizing into severe cuts. Is the state being frivolous with money in other areas? Or is it pretty much some sort of tax or nothing?
Persily: It's expensive to run services in Alaska. There's no economy of scale. Public health nurses, disaster response — a lot of cases other than the road system, you're flying people in and out. Remote schools, village schools, Prince of Wales Island schools — they're a lot more expensive to run than a big school on a road system in central Missouri.
The fastest-growing expense in the state budget is prisons. Half a billion dollars a year to run the Department of Corrections. Now, do you want to start letting people out? You want to chain them to the wall and not provide three meals a day? Yes, you can cut prison spending — but not humanely. And certainly there are probably some people who could be released without being a danger to society. But inflation, fuel costs — we're all paying more at the pump. Well, so is the Marine Highway System. So is the Department of Transportation. High oil prices are great for revenue, but it also drives our expenses. Alaska is just a very spread-out state. It's expensive to provide services.
Some people have said, well, let's go back to private prisons. Let's ship Alaska inmates down to Arizona and stick them in a private prison, save money. Probably would. But you're also separating them from their families. And if they have any hope of getting back into life when they get out — because most inmates do get out, they don't die in prison — do you want to do something that's going to make it harder for them to come back to society?
So look, legislators have watched this for decades. This past week, the House was talking about this year's operating budget proposal. You had some members of the House saying we need to give more in dividends. So here's my proposal to cut spending — they wanted to give another $900 million to dividends and they proposed $10 million of cuts. Come on, guys.
On Step Alaska: Yeah, telling people on a campaign trail that you're going to cut government is a winning strategy. Actually doing it never seems to happen because there's just not much there to cut at a big level. Sure, you can find small pockets, but you also have to make real decisions — do you want inmates to go to Arizona or keep them in Alaska? What kind of hours do you want public libraries to have? What kind of funding for harbor and dock rebuilds?
Persily: Exactly. And certainly if you did not pay a dividend, the state would be very healthy. Last year's dividend was $650 million in cost to the state. The House version this year is about a billion dollars. I think the Senate will reduce that. There are some who argue, get rid of the dividend before you impose taxes. If you get rid of the PFD, you probably don't need taxes. But getting rid of the dividend — I'll be honest, it's not going to hurt my budget. But there's a significant portion of Alaska that really does depend on that annual cash. So that's where it becomes a human values question. Do I eliminate the dividend knowing that maybe more than half of Alaskans won't suffer, but a significant portion will see a real deterioration in their lives and their kids' lives because they don't get that dividend?
But others say, well, I'll vote for a tax, but not to pay a dividend. And once the tax revenue goes into the checkbook, it's hard to say which dollar paid for schools and which paid for a dividend. It's all one checkbook.
On Step Alaska: How has that conversation evolved in your time covering it? Because now in the age of social media, people can show what they did or what they're fighting for, and their message can get out very strong and fast with no context and no depth of understanding. How has the internet and social media impacted the way these discussions are being had?
Persily: It has made it easier to veer from reality and harder to deal with reality. Governor Dunleavy, in his eight years as governor, campaigned successfully — wildly successfully — in his two elections by promising a full dividend. The checks would bounce, the money's not there. Doesn't matter, I still promise it. And I think social media has — I want to say dumbed down — it has turned substantial policy debates into memes or TikTok videos and all the other garbage. It's made it hard. Because to say dividend versus taxes, prisoners in-state or out-of-state, do you want to double university tuition — right now in Alaska, any community with 10 students gets a school. That's from a settlement decades ago out of a court case for villages and rural Alaskans. Well, you could close a bunch of schools if you change that threshold to 25. If you don't have 25 students in your town, that's it, no state school, got to do correspondence. Those are hard decisions, important decisions. You can't do those with your two thumbs on a phone.
On Step Alaska: No, I think that's a reality. And I think as consumers of it, when we buy into these overly simplistic representations of what is a really important conversation — it's not a new conversation, this has been a debate forever. It's just done in a way that seems much less good faith and more disingenuous. Obviously there were shady people in the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s too. That human nature hasn't changed, but social media has provided the outlet to bring out the worst. Senator Joe McCarthy — everybody's a communist.
Persily: So, there are some people who believe Alaska won't deal with reality until we're really bleeding. Well, I don't think that's particularly healthy for a community. Wait till the school collapses and things are so dire and miserable that you have to triage who goes into the ER. But some say, until that happens, we won't have the political will to act.
I think the next governor is going to have a real problem, because the next governor hopefully will tell the truth, and it's going to have to be one hell of a leader to bring the public and the legislature along and say, guys, we all know this. We've all talked about it. We don't have the nerve to do anything. We've got to summon the nerve. We've got to fix this. We're in our 13th year now of out-migration — meaning more people leave the state every year than move here. You're not replenishing the workforce. You look at some of these towns and they're just aging. They have a worker shortage because there's no one there at working age and new people aren't coming in. These are not easy to fix. It's going to take one hell of a governor who can work with the legislature, and a lot of people making hard choices that will probably cost them their elected jobs. But better for the state. It's easier for me to say — I'm not an elected official.
On Step Alaska: You mentioned that it might take us getting to the point where we're doing a substantial amount of bleeding. Do you think we're at that point? Are we close to it?
Persily: Well, I think we're close to it, but obviously not close enough to change public opinion. Now, we'll see. We've got an election coming up in November. We're going to elect a U.S. senator and a U.S. House member — those certainly aren't involved in state fiscal policy, but they set a political tone. And then a governor, lieutenant governor, the entire state house, half the state senate. I think you'll get an indication. It's sort of like the midterms on the national level. I guess I look at Alaska's election similarly — do Alaskans start electing more legislators who want to deal with this? Because they need safety in numbers. If you're the only legislator saying, come on guys, we've got to do something, no one's behind you. If you get a dozen or more behind you, now you start getting some political weight.
So I'm looking at the elections. I'm trying to be hopeful.
On Step Alaska: Are you trying to be hopeful, or are you convincing yourself that you are? Or is it a pretty tough sell?
Persily: I'm a Cubs fan. I've been hopeful my whole life. We got lucky once in 2016. Maybe we'll get lucky again. But if we don't deal with it, it's going to be bad. Really bad. You look at schools, you look at other services that are deteriorating. And certainly this governor and others have just wanted to put more of the burden on cities and boroughs. There's a limit to what the Ketchikan Gateway Borough or the City and Borough of Wrangell can accommodate.
On Step Alaska: The realm of politics seems to not be worth it for a lot of the people that we would probably want as our leaders. They don't want it themselves. They don't want to put their families through it. So the people we really want look at it and think, man, it's not worth it. I care a lot about my country and my state, but I have to also care about my sanity and my family. It really disincentivizes public service and elevates people who really don't have much desire for anything except personal power, clout, and money.
Persily: Yeah, it costs a lot of money. It's a lot of personal sacrifice. It puts your family through a lot to run for public office, because you don't know what crazy falsehoods or misleading statements some sleazeball is going to dredge up on social media about you, your family, your parents, your aunt three times removed — who knows what they dig up. And then when you get elected, it's constant. It's a lot of work. And it pays better than journalism, but you're not going to get rich off of it. So yeah, it's hard. You have a lot of good people saying, look, I've got a great job and a great life. I'm not going to burn it all down just to be a member of the legislature or run for city council or school board. And you're right — but we've got to find those people, or we're destined to fail.
On Step Alaska: So as publisher of the Wrangell Sentinel, is that like a time to take a breath and think, this is the core journalism of a small community, this is preventing a news desert? Or does it just add to your stress?
Persily: Oh, it adds to it. I bought it back five years ago. My late wife and I owned it from '76 to '84. Different owners through the years. I bought it back almost five and a half years ago thinking, oh, it's kind of slid down, I can help rejuvenate it and then turn it over to some young person. Well, it loses money. Last year it lost $30,000. It'll lose more this year. People don't read newspapers, and our readership is old. I lose money on every paper we print. Younger people — it's not that they're bad people, it's just not how they were raised. They get what they think is news some other way through scrolling or some other crap on the phone.
And Wrangell's not alone. All newspapers nationwide are losing readership, costs are going up, papers are closing. The Cordova Times stopped printing — they just went online only a couple months ago. Seward lost its newspaper a long time ago. The newspapers in Homer and Kenai are both shaky. It's just a tough business. I'd like to think we're helping bring information to the public, but I don't know how to get people to read it.
On Step Alaska: Is there some sort of solution? Or outside of a massive social and cultural shift back to reading papers and subscribing, being informed and caring more about what's right for the community — is there something that we as community members can do to help?
Persily: Well, read the paper and buy a subscription. But there are a lot of newspapers around the country that are going to a nonprofit or funder model. Newspapers used to get, generalizing, two-thirds of their revenue from advertising — classified ads were huge, public notices, department stores, car dealers, real estate — and one-third from readers. Well, advertising is gone. No one buys classified ads anymore. First it was Craigslist, now it's Facebook. Department stores, car dealers, grocery stores, restaurants — they all just use social media. There's no restaurant in Wrangell that ever buys an ad. I'm not blaming them — they just post their daily specials on Facebook. So now the business model for newspapers is one-third advertising, one-third from readers, and the other third is a loss. You just subsidize it.
Some newspapers are switching to a nonprofit or funder model — instead of asking for subscriptions, you're asking people to make donations, like public radio. I have a hard time with that, and one reason I haven't done it is, yes, I lose money, yes I've subsidized it for five years. But in Wrangell, you've also got people asking for money for public radio, the senior center, hospice, the library, the sports travel fund. Why should I be more important than them? People have limited money to donate. If I say, guys, you've got to give me $100 because we're losing money — okay, but then you can't give it to the sports travel fund. Maybe the sports travel fund is more important. I'm just trying to be honest. I feel really uncomfortable saying, okay, put me on your charity list alongside the Salvation Army and Toys for Tots. There are so many nonprofits trying to get money. I'm real uncomfortable saying, me too.
On Step Alaska: What are you excited about? Is there something on the horizon, something you enjoy doing that makes you excited?
Persily: I like writing. I like writing editorials and opinion columns. I like writing news stories. I like connecting with people. The fun thing to me about being a journalist — print, radio, even TV — is you learn something new every day. I interviewed a guy about the Inuit stick pull competition at the Native Youth Olympics. I didn't know what that was. So it's like reading a book without having to read the book — you just learn something new, you meet different people. And along the way, you hopefully make people's lives better. You've just got to figure out some way to get them to read it. And to break even. I'd be ecstatic if we could break even.
On Step Alaska: So in closing, where can people find some of your pieces? What are some things people should be aware of and looking forward to?
Persily: They could go to the Wrangell Sentinel website, which is wrangellsentinel.com. We do have a paywall, but I think you're allowed to look at three articles a month for free — it's what they call a leaky paywall. The Ketchikan Daily News prints some of my columns. The Sitka Sentinel prints some. The Keweenaw Pilot. The Juneau Independent. We try to share among Southeast newspapers. But no, I haven't started doing podcasts. I don't have my own website. I've thought about it — then I could post wherever I want. Well, no one wants to hear that much from me. I have not gone that route yet.
On Step Alaska: Well, thanks a lot for being on here. Really appreciate it.
Persily: Thank you. This was fun.
Thanks for listening. Please share. If you found today's conversation useful, you can go deeper with my writing on Substack — that's where I expand on these ideas from the show.
