Alaska News
Alaska News is the first newsroom on the Communities News platform, live since spring 2026. It covers borough assemblies, school boards, public hearings and statewide politics. Software drafts each story from a public meeting. Every draft passes an automated review before it can publish, and editors review nearly every article. Every article carries its sources, its transcript and the name of the person accountable for it.
It is also the most measured newsroom in Alaska. No other outlet in this market publishes a blinded test of its own neutrality, scored by AI models from several vendors. None publishes its coverage footprint and its findings, ours and theirs, with the raw data to download. This page is that record, so you can check it.
It started with a personal problem. Cale, its creator, wanted to know what Alaska's assemblies, boards and hearings were actually deciding. Cale found a gap in the coverage instead, built the answer and shared it with the neighbors. That origin still sets the rules. Readers who want to support the work can subscribe, but there is no paywall and there never will be one. The journalism stays open to everyone in the community it covers.
Publishing volume, measured#
Alaska News publishes 42.5 local stories a day, by our estimate, more than any other outlet we could measure.
These are estimates from each outlet's own public feeds as of 2026-10-31. Each daily check divides a feed's items by the days its window spans. The published rate averages those daily readings, so one quiet Sunday cannot pass for an outlet's normal pace. The same method reads every outlet.
There are two numbers, because a feed is not all journalism. The full-feed rate counts everything in an outlet's feed, syndicated pieces included. Local reporting counts only its own news, politics, business and opinion pieces, sorted by the same rule for every outlet.
| Outlet | Local reporting/day (est.) | Full feed/day (est.) |
|---|---|---|
| Alaska News | 42.5 | 42.5 |
| Alaska's News Source | 9.4 | 37.6 |
| Anchorage Daily News | 8.5 | 22.8 |
| The Alaska Story | 5.7 | 6.2 |
| Juneau Independent | 5.7 | 11.1 |
| Alaska Beacon | 3.2 | 4.6 |
| Fairbanks Daily News-Miner | 2.4 | 2.8 |
| Alaska Watchman | 2.2 | 2.2 |
| Must Read Alaska | 1.9 | 1.9 |
| MatSu Sentinel | 1.1 | 1.2 |
| Nieman Lab | 0.7 | 1.4 |
| The Alaska Current | 0.6 | 0.8 |
| Anchorage Press | 0.5 | 0.8 |
Alaska News's volume includes short daily briefs alongside full stories. Anchorage Daily News's full feed is roughly one-third local reporting. The rest is national wire, sports and syndicated lifestyle columns, which is why its two columns differ most. We cannot measure Alaska Public Media with our current open-crawl method, because its advertised feed carries no items. A working feed or granted access would add it here. Our own feed holds only its newest half day of stories. So our rate is read from the feed itself, while the story counts below come from a once-a-day collection.
Stories nobody else covered#
332 of the 374 Alaska News articles we collected in the last 14 days covered stories that no other tracked outlet reported in the same window. The other outlets are Alaska Beacon, Alaska Watchman, Alaska's News Source, Anchorage Daily News, Anchorage Press, Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, Juneau Independent, MatSu Sentinel, Must Read Alaska, The Alaska Current, The Alaska Story. Stories were matched one by one, and the reasoning for each match is recorded.
Most of it is the civic record: the assemblies, boards and hearings a traditional newsroom rarely has the staff to sit through. Alaska News covers them every day.
Coverage, mapped →#
See where each outlet's stories actually happen, pinned on one map of Alaska from the articles themselves.
Neutrality, summarized →#
Alaska News shows a near-zero net lean. Its partisan lean is 0 on a scale from -3 to +3. 323 of its 330 scored articles show no detected lean at all. Its marks on analysis labeling and language neutrality are at the top of the board. Sometimes the same story ran elsewhere, and the blinded judges compared the accounts side by side. Ours won fairest treatment of evidence in 15 of 22 comparisons. The judges picked it once as the most editorialized.
A panel of three AI models, from three vendors, scores the articles against a published rubric. The models read them blinded, with no outlet names and no bylines. The standard behind the numbers is simple to state: report so the reader keeps real room to decide. Completeness is not neutrality. Context is a choice. A story can quote both sides while its structure does the persuading.
Outside reviewers see it too. In August 2026, Media Bias/Fact Check independently rated Alaska News Least Biased, with High factual reporting and High credibility.
The headline read as of 2026-10-31:
Craft against lean, the whole market on one map#
Lean measures direction and never quality, which is exactly why the two belong on one map. Each axis answers a different question, and where an outlet sits is its own measured answer to both. Positions move with the daily data. Hover any point for the exact numbers. Across the whole board today, the two move together: the further an outlet sits from level, the lower its craft scores run (correlation -0.96). It holds at -0.92 on evidence fairness, sourcing and source independence alone, the three dimensions that never read an article's wording.
| Outlet | Partisan lean | No lean detected | Read |
|---|---|---|---|
| Alaska News | 0 | 323 of 330 | near-zero net lean |
| Anchorage Daily News | -0.5 | 75 of 129 | leans left |
| Alaska Beacon | -0.4 | 74 of 114 | near-zero net lean |
See the full Alaska Media Bias Scorecard Alaska News's own scorecard page
The full scorecard covers evidence fairness, sourcing, source independence, analysis labeling and language for every outlet. It also holds the access-practices comparison, the raw data to download, and the method with its validation checks and limits, including where the panel agrees with Ground News.
We publish the findings that cost us#
The panel's hardest read of Alaska News: a newsroom drafted from public meetings scores high on trusting official records and lower on testing them. No outlet on the board is more deferent to institutions. Its institutional posture is -1 on the -3 to +3 scale as of 2026-10-31. We named it, and we are building the editorial muscle that moves it. The published score is how everyone, our readers included, will know when it has moved.
No other newsroom in this market measures itself at all, let alone in public. The measurements only mean something because the unflattering ones ship too. A scorecard that can never catch its own publisher is an advertisement, and ours is not one. The panel has flagged our own reporting, and the flag ships in the published data like everything else.
In one September 2026 case, two of the three vendors read a story of ours as mildly left. Nine days later, under a different rubric version, they reproduced that exact reading, with their reasoning recorded both times. The third read it level, and the split ships too. The current count is always in the table above: as of 2026-10-31, 7 of 330 scored articles carry a detected lean.
The measuring already changes how we write. A blinded head-to-head found that our closing fact-checks read as a lean. They never said which side's claim they supported, so their placement persuaded in the opposite direction of the facts. Our editors now have a rule: when a fact-check lands, say which way it cuts. That loop is the platform: measure, publish, fix, measure again. It is why the flattering numbers above deserve belief.