Outlet profile

Anchorage Daily News

U.S. center-left

Owned byBinkley Co., a family-owned Alaska media company led by Ryan Binkley

FundingDigital subscriptions, print subscriptions, advertising, and reader donations

On the administrationbroadly critical

Background

The paper was founded in 1946 as the weekly Anchorage News by Norman C. Brown, later becoming a daily as Anchorage grew during and after the postwar era. For much of the late 20th century it was owned by the McClatchy newspaper chain, during which time it built a reputation for aggressive investigative reporting and won Pulitzer Prizes for Public Service in 1976 (for coverage of Teamsters Union influence in Alaska) and 1989 (for 'A People in Peril,' examining alcoholism and suicide in Alaska Native communities). In 2014, McClatchy sold the paper to Alice Rogoff, who merged it with her online outlet Alaska Dispatch under the combined masthead Alaska Dispatch News. That venture filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2017, and Ryan Binkley's family company purchased it for approximately $1.35 million, reverting to the Anchorage Daily News name. In 2020, the paper won a third Pulitzer for Public Service for its 'Lawless' series, a year-long investigation — conducted in partnership with ProPublica — that documented the near-total absence of police protection in a third of Alaska's villages and spurred legislative action. The paper is funded mainly through digital subscriptions, which numbered nearly 19,000 by mid-2024, along with advertising and periodic reader fundraising campaigns. Its editorial board has published pieces critical of Trump administration actions on environmental protections, Indigenous rights, immigration, and federal data access, and the paper joined a coalition of U.S. newspapers that editorially challenged Trump's second-term policies.

Sources

Profile compiled 2026-08-23; refreshed when ownership, funding, or the administration changes.

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