 Good afternoon, everybody. I first want to thank the Knight Foundation, Alberto, Jennifer, Sam, and our fairy godmother, Robin, for pulling us all together. It's quite an accomplishment. And I also just want to say how honored and privileged I am to be sharing a stage with these four people. It has been a pleasure over the last month to get to know them and to get to know their incredible stories, which they're going to share with you. So the economic tsunami that has hit the newspaper industry has been, as you all know, particularly destructive to local news with potentially very dire consequences. Corruption goes unchecked. Institutions that impact our everyday lives are not held to account. We lose our eyes on the street and our understanding of what's going on, both across the street and across town. And we lose our shared knowledge that bridges divides and we become more divided. And this tsunami is accelerating at gale force speed with, as Ken Doctor put it, the financialization and consolidation of the industry by businesses whose primary interest is cutting costs to maximize cash flow, consolidation for maximum efficiency, whatever that means, and to make money until there is no more money to make. Just consider what's happened in the past four months. The two largest news chains, Gannett and Gatehouse, merged, taking on $1.8 billion in debt and plans for slashing $300 million in operating costs. That's 261 newspapers and 30% of our local news coverage. Warren Buffett sold his 28 papers to Lee Enterprises for 70% less than he paid for them. The Tribune Company is now controlled by Alden Capital. I need not say any more about that. And on February 13th, McClatchy declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy, having experienced the two-fisted punch of an 80% drop in ad revenues over the past decade, and about $535 million in unfunded pension liabilities. That's 30 newspapers, including Miami's beloved hometown paper, The Miami Herald, which is punching up against all odds way beyond its weight class with grit, determination, and commitment. And I just want everybody to give them a round of applause. OK, enough doom and gloom. Here's the good news. All across the country, local news is being revitalized in the public interest and as a public service with a incredibly wide range of models, for-profit, nonprofit, newsroom collaboratives, startups, and transformation to new ownership models. But there is a common ingredient for success and sustainability, and it's called local, local, local, and then I will say local. Local civic leadership, local attachment and roots, local community involvement, and local investment, be it commercial investment or philanthropic investment. Joining me in this conversation are representatives from two such institutions, both of whom have faced dire financial circumstances and, quite frankly, existential crises, retooling and restructuring their news operations to chart a sustainable path forward. Our first speakers are David Huland, editor of The Anchorage Daily News, and Diane Kaplan, president of the Rasmussen Foundation, based in Anchorage. And I think they win the award for longest distance traveled. Take it away. Thanks, Julie. I have the privilege of being the editor of a local online and print newsroom with about 30 people in an amazing, complicated, interesting place. We cover a medium-sized city and everything that goes with it, government, schools, crime. But we also cover Alaska, this huge place with an international economy, complicated natural resource battles, climate change, recall campaign against the governor, and a couple hundred communities sprawling across this huge area that really face some real challenges. We do that with a newsroom of about 30 people. All the challenges facing local news that we've all been hearing about, they're real, they're serious. And we deal with them every day. And just to get something straight right from the beginning, I don't have any magic for how to solve the local news crisis, but we found some paths that, for us at least, give us some hope for stability and sustainability to be able to continue to serve our community with local, original reporting. If you don't know us, we came very close to not existing. We were a long time a McClatchy property. We were sold to an online-only startup. The thing ended up in Chapter 11 in 2017. And then we were purchased. It could have gone a lot of different directions, but we were purchased by a local family with no publishing experience that had a strong interest in maintaining local news and continuing local news in Alaska. We had a big reorganization, painful downsizing, but we were profitable within a year. We've embraced a big shift to direct reader revenue. And for us, that really means an emphasis on digital subscriptions and digital audience. And partnerships have become, as part of that, really important to us. On the national level, there is a whole group of entities that are here at this conference that have been hugely helpful to us and local news. The Knight Foundation, Pointer, American Press Institute, LEMFEST, all those are working to support news organizations, change their business models, develop best practices, and really helping to nurture a community of news organizations out there that's developed. We're working now with the Facebook Journalism Project on a digital subscription project that includes our friends from Salt Lake City, actually. Solutions Journalism Network, they were actually, they had a couple of people up in Anchorage in our newsroom last week doing training for our newsroom on maybe changing some ways that we report, not just focusing all the time on problems, but sometimes looking for fixes. That's at the national level, but for this thing to work, it has to be local, local, local, understanding the community, working with the community, serving the community, ultimately serving the community. And so another way we've worked with partners is to find new ways to directly support local reporting and expand our capacity for it. And that's really central to everything, is strong, original local reporting. We're now in our second year working with the ProPublica Local Reporting Network. We're taking a deep, sustained look at sexual violence in Alaska and failures in law enforcement across Alaska. ProPublica has underwritten the cost of a full-time reporter, which allowed us to hire reporters behind that person over the past two years, and also gave us support to just do that project in a way that gave it more power and impact than we could have done on our own. So that's really been a great partnership. We're excited to have reporters starting this summer from Report for America. They're gonna be focused on covering healthcare and public health in Alaska, which is one of the areas as the news ecosystem has kind of shrunk up there, that's not being heavily covered, we think there's some opportunity. And we're experimenting with direct local support for reporting funded directly by a group of Alaska nonprofits. Several years ago, we developed a partnership with a group of nonprofits led by Rasmussen Foundation. We spent a year reporting on the impacts of alcoholism in Alaska. This group of nonprofits paid for a reporter and a photographer full-time. We retained sole control over the content, had a contract that reflected that, it felt like we were, that was pretty early in that whole process of developing these partnerships. So we're in the early stages of developing a new partnership, similar to that, that's gonna, we hope, take a sustained look at homelessness in Alaska. That's just one more path to independent, original, local reporting. We're looking for ways to do more. So what gets said here in Miami stays here in Miami. So everyone be truthful and transparent. So raise your hand if you had your first drink of alcohol, not including communion wine or Passover wine when you were 12 or under, 13, 14, 15, 16, under 18, not until you were over 21. Oh, no one raised their hand. Okay, so I came to Alaska for two years and that was 35 years ago, like a lot of other people. And since I've been there, I have never met a single person who hasn't experienced misery because of someone drinking too much, even in my own family. More than 10 years ago, a board member of Rasmussen Foundation who is a superior court judge, she's now on the ninth circuit, was coming to the end of her term and she said, if we don't do something about alcohol before I leave this board, I'm not gonna be able to live with myself. Every day, a parade of people came in front of her. They were requesting domestic violence, restraining orders, divorces. It was children in need of aid, but it was really all alcohol. Four of the five leading causes of death for Native men in Alaska are alcohol related. So we convened 20 Alaska leaders and we decided to create a new way of thinking and called it Recover Alaska. So those of you who raised your hand at 12, 13, or 14 listen up because we learned very early on the most significant factor in determining if a person will have problems with alcohol later in life is the age of their first drink. Most teenagers think most teenagers drink. In fact, most teenagers do not drink, but if most teenagers thought most teenagers didn't drink, they'd be less likely to drink. And we knew right there we needed a media strategy if we were gonna be successful. The first time I approached the Daily News and it was David's predecessor and suggested we have a partnership, I think he said something like I'd rather have my teeth worked on with a rusty drill than take a penny from the Rasmussen Foundation. But by 2013, things had changed and the time was right. So as David said, we funded one reporter, one photographer and the state of intoxication was started. It won national and regional recognition and included photography and videography. Here is the Recover Alaska website. And in the second slide that you'll see is Darlene Trigg. She's an Alaska native in Nome, Alaska who formed a patrol of safety officers. And it was really important to show an Alaska native in a problem-solving role, not as a victim, not as an abuser, because most people in Alaska think most people who have a problem with alcohol are natives. And in this slide, you can see Art Ivanov who just found out that his friend froze to death outside as a result of drinking too much. We never expected video to be part of the project. It wasn't even in the contract, but it ended up being one of the most powerful parts of the program. Heidi Case moved from Utah to Alaska to access better treatment for her son who had fetal alcohol syndrome. You know, the doctors always tell you don't drink when you're pregnant, but what they don't tell you is why. He's upstairs. Sorry. Trying to think how I would describe Jacob. He's a sweet kid when he wants to be, and then he has that other side of him. You know, it's an everyday, constant battle with him, trying to get him to do anything, really. I actually knew something was wrong with Jacob before he was even born. If you drink it all and you're sexually active, you're a candidate. You're a child's candidate. It's all there is to it. I've had a lot of time, you know, to process. And the hardest thing is just knowing that it won't ever go away. Two critical elements to getting to yes from no. First of all, we presented the Anchorage Daily News with a copy of the contract between the Ford Foundations and the Washington Post and with the LA Times. And I think that presented that this was gonna become a model that every newspaper had to look at. And secondly, we brought in five or six other funders so it wasn't just Rasmussen Foundation in the Anchorage Daily News, and we did it through a fund at the Alaska Community Foundation so there was some distance between the funders and the newspaper. The very first story that ran really pissed off one of the funders. And I tell funders, if you're gonna get in this, it's not a question of if there will be a story you're not gonna like. It's when there will be a story you're not gonna like. And if you're not comfortable with that, this isn't the thing for you. Thank you. Thank you, David. And thank you, Diane. True words have never been spoken.