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Alaska reporting, on the ground and on prime-time TV
Francine Kiefer
Last fall, a friend asked if I had been watching the new ABC drama series “Alaska Daily.”
It stars Oscar winner Hilary Swank as a hard-bitten, disgraced journalist who exits the limelight of New York to work at a small metro paper in Anchorage. She teams up with the paper’s Indigenous reporter, played by Grace Dove, to investigate the ignored murder of a young Alaska Native woman.
In this era of diffuse television offerings, I hadn’t heard about the show, but my friend guessed correctly that I would love it. I got my start in journalism as a pipsqueak reporter at the Anchorage Daily News. So I binge-watched the show. It’s inspired by the real Daily News and its recent Pulitzer Prize. With contributions from ProPublica, the Anchorage paper exposed widespread violence and a lack of police protection in Alaska’s villages.
The show sparked a question from my friend: Are reporters as tough and pugnacious as the character played by Ms. Swank?
I happened to be on a reporting trip in Anchorage in December, and I stopped in at the Daily News to chat with the editor, David Hulen. It was part nostalgia, part shoptalk, and yep, I wanted to ask him how true the show was to the newsroom.
The Daily News worked closely with the show’s creators. They shared an interest in helping to restore faith in journalism by showing how reporters gather and verify facts, all while balancing work, family, and other challenges. “What they set out to do, above all, was humanize local news,” says Mr. Hulen, speaking of the show’s creators.
They got the look of the newsroom right, and the issues are real, but the show is fiction. Events are not based on any one story. Characters are archetypes or composites.
Mr. Hulen leads a small editorial staff of about 35. We talked about the scrappy paper’s near-death experiences over the decades, as well as its triumphs. Remarkably, it’s won three Pulitzer Prizes for public service, starting in 1976 with an investigation of the Teamsters union. That was under the leadership of Katherine Fanning, who went on to become editor of the Monitor in the 1980s.
The last episode of “Alaska Daily” aired on March 30. No announcement yet on whether ABC will renew. But ambition is in the DNA of the real Daily News, and with or without the dramatization, the work of these journalists will continue.
