Alaska News

Alaska News is the first newsroom on the Communities News platform, live since spring 2026: borough assemblies, school board sessions, public hearings, and statewide politics, drafted by the pipeline from public meetings and published after human editorial review. 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, multi-vendor evaluation of its own neutrality, its coverage footprint, and its findings, ours and theirs, with the raw data downloadable. This page is that record.

It started as a fix for a personal problem. Cale, its creator, wanted to know what Alaska's assemblies, boards, and hearings were actually deciding, found the coverage gap instead, and built the answer, then shared it with his 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

Estimated from each outlet's own public feeds as of 2026-10-09: each daily check divides the feed's items by the days its window spans, and the published rate averages those daily readings, so one quiet Sunday cannot masquerade as an outlet's pace. The same instrument reads everyone. Two numbers, because a feed is not all journalism: the full-feed rate counts everything an outlet syndicates, while local reporting counts only its own news, politics, business, and opinion pieces, classified by the same rule for every outlet.

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 the two columns differ most there. Alaska Public Media cannot be measured through our current open-crawl method (its advertised feed carries no items); a working feed or granted access adds it here.

Stories nobody else covered

Of the 389 articles Alaska News published in the last 14 days, 349 covered stories that no other tracked outlet (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) reported in the same window, as matched story by story with each match's reasoning recorded. This is journalism that would not exist otherwise: the assemblies, boards, and hearings the traditional staffing model cannot reach get covered here or not at all, and the overwhelming share of what we publish is exactly that.

"Tracked outlets" is the honest boundary: we match against the outlets we index, not every publication in Alaska.

Coverage, mapped →

Where each outlet's stories actually happen, pinned on one map of Alaska from the articles themselves.

See the coverage map

Neutrality, summarized →

A panel of three AI models from three vendors reads articles blinded (no outlet names, no bylines) and scores them against a published rubric, and Alaska News reads dead level: a net partisan lean of 0, with 117 of 120 scored articles showing no detected lean at all, and marks on analysis labeling and language neutrality at the top of the board. In blinded head-to-head tests on stories another outlet also covered, independent judges rated our account the fairest in its treatment of evidence and the clearest about what is known and who claims it. The standard behind those numbers is simple to state: report so the reader keeps real room to decide. Completeness is not neutrality, context is a choice, and 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 2026-10-09:

Craft against lean, the whole market on one map

See the full neutrality scorecard

The full scorecard covers evidence fairness, sourcing, source independence, analysis labeling, and language across every outlet, the access-practices comparison, the methodology with its validation checks and limitations (including where the panel agrees with Ground News), and the raw data download.

We publish the findings that cost us

No other newsroom in this market measures itself at all, let alone in public, and the measurements only mean something because the unflattering ones ship too. 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, the most institutionally deferent profile on the board (institutional posture -1.1 on the -3 to +3 scale as of 2026-10-09). We named it, we are building the editorial muscle that moves it, and the published score is how everyone, including our readers, will know when it has moved.

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 and reproduced that exact reading nine days later under a different rubric version, with their reasoning recorded both times, while the third read it level; the split ships too. The current count is always in the table above: as of 2026-10-09, 3 of 120 scored articles carry a detected lean.

The measuring already changes how we write. A blinded head-to-head found our closing fact-checks reading as a lean because they never said which side's claim they supported, so placement was persuading in the opposite direction of the facts. Our editors now have the rule: when a fact-check lands, say which way it cuts. That loop, measure, publish, fix, measure again, is the platform, and it is why the flattering numbers above deserve belief.

Back to Where We're Building · alaskanews.com