Southeast Alaska communities and their local newspapers share a common problem: Not enough people, and the ones who are here are getting older.
For the communities, an aging and declining population means not enough people to fill jobs. It means falling further behind in providing services that attract and retain new residents, making the situation worse.
For newspapers, it means a declining population of readers as aging residents who grew up with their local paper die out. Younger generations are so unconcerned about the necessity of newspapers that they don’t even know that newsprint long ago had another use after the reader had finished the pages — wrapping up fish. They think their phone and social media tells them everything they need to know.
They can’t wrap a fish in a smartphone, but they can use it to download a YouTube video on storing fish.
Yet social media doesn’t give people the unbiased facts about local government decisions, school test scores, state and municipal budgets, candidates for elected office, the honors won by their neighbors, the accomplishments of students — and what their communities are doing to stem the population decline.
Southeast Alaska’s population has dropped by 3,000 people in the past decade but its loss of working-age residents has been even steeper — a decline of 5,600 people between 2010 and 2023. There are fewer residents, a lot fewer working-age residents, and yet the work still needs to get done. The numbers add up to a debilitating shortage of people to fill job vacancies.
Part of the problem is that the region continues to increase its count of the state’s oldest residents, growing the 60-plus bracket from 17% of the population in 2010 to 27% last year, while dropping more than 2,000 school-age kids in population.
Those statistics from the annual Southeast Alaska by the Numbers report tell the same story newspaper owners are seeing. The area is hollowing out in the middle, falling further behind in new working-age residents and families. Southeast is missing out on the employees and business owners of the next generation, while newspapers are losing readers and much needed revenue.
It’s critical that communities and newspapers find solutions. Neither are getting any younger or economically healthier.
Towns could survive without a local paper, though they would lose a lot of what holds their community together. And newspapers could survive for a while in smaller towns, they would just get smaller themselves and provide less news. But both stand a better chance of reversing the spiraling decline, or at least stopping it, if they adapt.
For communities, that means accepting that new residents may not want the exact same life as long-time residents. They might move to Southeast for the outdoors and small-town safety, a slower pace than shopping malls and traffic, but they look hard at the schools and their course offerings, child care services, transportation, community activities for people their own age, and, of course, housing.
For newspapers, that means accepting that social media, while a competitor for people’s time, serves a purpose. It means using social media to build interest in what the paper is doing. It means providing readers with more than just news from City Hall and the state capital. It means clinging less tightly to how newspapers used to be and instead figuring out how they need to be if they are to survive.
Neither communities nor newspapers can live with only 60-plus residents and readers. Both need to attract a new audience.
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