Source: Thank you Alice – Craig Medred
Commentary
With Alaska’s largest newspaper today bankrupt and frightfully close to the verge of disappearing forever from the scene, there are a lot of people lining up to bash owner and publisher Alice Rogoff.
For some of them, those emotions are understandable. Mark Miller of M&M Wiring has every reason to want to burn the Alaska Dispatch News to the ground. Miller has been screwed out of almost $500,000 by the news company and to any small businessman that is a fortune.
It hurts not just Miller. It devastates the small crew that works not only for him, but with him. Miller is not one of those bosses who sits in an office or arrives at the work site to order people around. He’s a guy who buckles on a workbelt and puts in a day with the crew.
I admit to a lot more respect for the Miller’s of the world than for the Rogoffs of the world, but one cannot dismiss Rogoff as simply some rich lady from the East Coast trying to rip off Alaska because she most definitely was not that.
Rich lady’s from the East Coast don’t roll out their sleeping bag on the floor of someone’s unfinished, unheated, under-construction home in rural Alaska and say, “thank you very much for letting me have a place to sleep.”
The Rogoff picture is a complicated one, and the job of journalists is to stand back, put aside their emotions, and look at the realities of complicated pictures.
