Alaska Dispatch
| Type | Online newspaper |
|---|---|
| Owner(s) |
Alice Rogoff Tony Hopfinger |
| Founded | 2008 |
| Headquarters | 2301 Merrill Field Drive Anchorage, Alaska |
| Website | adn.com |
Alaska Dispatch is a news organization founded in 2008 and based in Anchorage, Alaska. It was originally an online news outlet focusing on statewide coverage of the U.S. state of Alaska, and on circumpolar affairs and policy. The site was an advertising-based for-profit enterprise, setting it apart from many other, not-for-profit online-only news websites like ProPublica or the Texas Tribune. In 2014, the organization purchased the Anchorage Daily News from McClatchy Newspapers, merging the two news operations under the masthead Alaska Dispatch News.
Alaska Dispatch began as an Alaska news blog in 2008, started by former Bloomberg and Newsweek correspondent Tony Hopfinger and his then-wife, journalist Amanda Coyne, who wrote articles and blogs for Alaska Dispatch until late 2012. In 2009, Alice Rogoff, former U.S. News & World Report chief financial officer and wife of Carlyle Group co-founder David Rubenstein, bought a majority share in the website, and the organization moved into a hangar located along Anchorage's Merrill Field Airport, where Rogoff, a licensed pilot, also houses her Cessna 206. With Rogoff's investment, the staff grew to include journalists who had previously worked for other Alaska news outlets, like the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, the Anchorage Press, local NBC affiliate KTUU and the Anchorage Daily News.
In 2009, the site earned positive coverage for its series on a massacre of caribou in the rural Alaska village of Point Hope. In 2010, the Columbia Journalism Review called Alaska Dispatch "a regional reporting powerhouse," while the American Journalism Review did a lengthy profile of the news site's willingness to fly a reporter thousands of miles to cover the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. In that same profile, an editor of the Anchorage Daily News newspaper, at the time one of the site's competitors, referred to Alaska Dispatch's coverage as inconsistent, and questioned the sustainability of its business model.
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