Going the distance revealed common experiences across the biggest state in the U.S.

Alaska Public Media managing editor Annie Feidt returned to her station in Anchorage fired up after the America Amplified fly-in in the spring of 2024. She had heard several stations pitch practical engagement ideas to talk to their communities throughout the 2024 election cycle. Particularly, one idea stood out to her: Montana Public Radio’s road trip, in which statehouse reporter Shaylee Ragar traveled 900 miles to speak to communities across the large state. Alaska is more than four times the size of Montana, but the idea still intrigued Feidt. What would it look like if AKPM tried a road trip?

She decided to pitch the idea to Juneau-based reporter Eric Stone. But before she had the opportunity, Stone asked her: What if they went on a road trip? So they did: two weeks, ten communities, and several hyperlocal stories in a series called The View from Here, which highlighted issues that challenge and unite Alaskans across the territory of America’s largest state.

Objective

“We set out to create an approach to covering politics by focusing on the people who are affected by politics — that is to say, everyone,” Stone said. While Feidt was getting inspiration from America Amplified, Stone was listening to “The Run-Up,” a podcast from the New York Times looking at the run-up to the 2024 election.

“They were capturing perspectives that were not present in typical front-page stories about politics,” Stone said, and that really intrigued him. The “reporter visits a small town and hangs out at the diner” trope is often parodied, but there’s a reason people do it, he said: “They are people who exist, and they should be acknowledged, and they should be part of our reporting.”

In addition to Stone, the AKPM team pulled in Liz Ruskin, who covers federal politics and policy for the statewide news network. Ruskin spends much of the year in DC but summers in Alaska, where she’s from. The team worked together to create a list of questions they would ask everyone they talked to:

– What do you wish other Alaskans understood about the challenges facing your community? 

– It’s an election year. How are you feeling about your political choices this year? What do you want politicians to be talking about as they compete for your vote? What could get you excited about voting for someone?

– Do you feel like your community is more or less divided than it was five or ten years ago?

In terms of output, they planned to file vox-pops from the road as well as issues-focused stories, interviews from the trip, audiograms for social media, and more.

The Challenge

Alaska is big. At 586,000 square miles, it’s the biggest state in the US, much of it federal land. The population is comparatively small, spread out over a huge area; because of this, just getting places can be a challenge.

And even if the roads were smooth, the weather clear and the ferries running on schedule, it still took a lot of time. Both Stone and Ruskin put in weeks of work to make the road trip happen, though many of the individual visits they scheduled were quicker than they’d have liked. Stone found himself wishing he had more time to digest and reflect on what he heard before he had to turn around stories and roll on to the next location.

And in many of the places they visited, people hadn’t even heard of Alaska Public Media. Where do you meet people when they have no reason to come to you?

The Solution

“We didn’t do a scientific sample; we tried to find places where we could encounter a lot of people, hang out, talk to them,” Stone said. “And it turned out: Post offices!”

Because of the infrastructure challenges, it doesn’t make sense for everywhere in Alaska to have streetside mail delivery. A lot of people have P.O. boxes instead, making the post office a common community touch point. The team tried to get half a dozen people to talk to them at each post office they visited. To get to those towns’ post offices, the team drove a cumulative 800-plus miles in a branded Subaru that Stone christened the “Alaska Public Mediamobile.” Sometimes they relied on ferry travel; a few times, they had to fly. (Alaska is BIG!)

It was challenging to have two full-time reporters out on the road instead of in the office, so they planned the road trips around Stone and Ruskins’ schedules — summer is always a bit of a lull after busy legislative sessions. AKPM relied on its statewide network to help take up the slack and free up Stone and Ruskin for the project.

“Thankfully, we didn’t have a volcano going off or anything like that,” Feidt joked.

And it was worth it. “We really got outside not just our Anchorage bubble but our public media bubble,” Feidt said. Stone and Ruskin “talked to people who had no idea who we were.”

Not only that, but the coverage meant a lot to the people who got it, especially because those communities very rarely saw themselves in the news. The issues pieces did particularly well in terms of web traffic, Feidt said, and they underscored the similarities between Alaskans despite their political differences. “It’s a big, diverse state, but it’s amazing how connected we are as Alaskans because of the challenge of living here,” Feidt said. “There are many challenges that bind us together.”

Just one example: In Homer, a town on Kachemak Bay in Cook Inlet, salmon runs had another unproductive year. When fisheries underproduce, they’re eligible for disaster funding from the federal government, but that funding often came long after it was helpful. Nine hours away in Valdez, people who made their living fishing reported the same thing. It’s not a hyperlocal issue, but a statewide one, Stone said. “It’s not one I would have known about if I had not spent time in Homer and Valdez.”

Childcare access, housing affordability and an exhaustion of partisan politics also cropped up as common themes. After the road trip, the team held a live event showcasing some of the audio from people they’d met on the journey. The event was small but well attended, and earned good feedback from attendees.

The Takeaways

While a road trip of this size is not often feasible, Feidt and Stone said it did inspire them to consider other ways of working community engagement into their future work. For one, Feidt said, she’s thinking of ways to utilize their statewide network more. With reporters in a dozen or more communities, it could be interesting to try sending just one from each station to a local post office and talk to community members like Stone and Ruskin did. (In fact, AKPM did try this on Election Day, and it worked well, Feidt said.)

For another, they’re keeping their Hearken embed, which has already underscored Stone and Feidt’s points about the unique experience of being Alaskan that unites people in the state. When the Trump administration pushed for renaming Denali to Mount McKinley, AKPM published a Hearken question asking Alaskans which name they preferred. Of the 700-plus responses they received, Feidt estimates about 97 percent were in favor of Denali.

Stone laughed, “Alaskans feel really strongly about that” – as they do, it seems, about many issues. 

Want to learn more about journalism and road trips? Check Nate Hegyi and the Mountain West News Bureau’s experience.