Sentinel adds new reporter to staff

Sarah Aslam is the newest addition to the Sentinel staff, starting work as a reporter in Wrangell on Sept. 20 after almost eight years in news in Orlando, Florida, with a stint in 2016 in Seward and Anchorage.

"I met Sarah when she was on vacation in Anchorage in July, and knew then she belonged in Alaska, not Florida," said Sentinel publisher Larry Persily.

Aslam will cover borough government and other news in Wrangell, joining editor Marc Lutz and office manager Amber Armstrong on the Sentinel staff.

"Wrangell deserves a newspaper that fully reports on the community, and the staff additions are part of that effort," said Persily, who took over ownership on Jan. 1.

"I thought I had left Alaska in the rearview mirror" after leaving an Anchorage television station in 2016, Aslam said. But after reading a tweet from an Alaska reporter about the Sentinel job opening this summer, she changed her view in the mirror. "This is completely unexpected."

She was born and raised in Maryland, in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., before going to college in Florida and graduating with a bachelor's degree in journalism in 2013. She worked at several TV stations and print publications in Florida, with the break in 2016 to work at the Seward Journal weekly newspaper and Anchorage TV station KTUU.

"The air just smells so good," she said of her first impressions of Wrangell. "It was good not to feel like you're being boiled alive," commenting on the several days of 90-degree weather in Orlando before she boarded the Alaska Airlines flight north.

Aslam said she was drawn to stories as a child and wanted to grow up to be a storyteller. Her mother would take her and her sister to the library and she developed a curiosity about the world. "Journalism seemed a natural fit."

She sees her role in Wrangell as reporting on stories that will inform the residents. "I want to do justice by the community."