After forty four years in print, the Skagway news is shifting to an online only format. Starting in January the paper will no longer come out in a printed edition. Melinda Munson and Gretchen Wemhoff have owned the paper since 2020. Munson said that it was a hard decision to make, but a realistic one, and she is ready to go to great lengths to ease the transition to her readers

“It cost us about $2,000 a month to print the paper. And we don’t have that. COVID hit everybody hard and every business on Broadway incredibly hard. Most of our readers read us online. And I realized that there are people that are very married to reading paper in print. And we do feel deeply, deeply sorry to those readers. And we definitely don’t want to lose those readers. So we’re doing everything we can. We are willing to go into their homes and teach them how to read the paper online. We’ll continue to have a PDF edition so you can go on the website and you can either just click on the article and read it or you can go to the PDF version, which looks like an electronic newspaper and you can flip the pages and read it that way.”

She stresses the opportunities the move will open 

“Being online actually gives us a lot of interesting opportunities that print doesn’t, and makes us be able to put our advertising prices down a little bit, which means that people who couldn’t afford to advertise can now afford to advertise. It means that we could do things like we don’t have to print an eight page or a 12 page, we could print a 10 page, we just start to do a lot of fun things online that we wouldn’t necessarily have time to do because of being tied to that print. So really, it’s us embracing the future and moving forward”

The paper’s previous owner, Larry Persily of Anchorage, felt strongly that it should be in local ownership. s Munson recalls:

“So one day, I saw in Anchorage Daily News that Larry wanted to basically give the paper away to anybody who could live in Skagway and read the paper from Skagway. And so I convinced Gretchen that she and I should apply. And we did and a little bit to our surprise, surprise, Larry picked us. And so I moved to Skagway with my seven kids and my husband and Gretchen continues to live in the anchorage area and she kind of pops in and out.”

Munson was surprised by the magnitude of what they had stepped into.

“I think the big shock to us is we thought we were buying a small town paper, but we didn’t. We bought a paper that is in the 18th most visited port in the world so it’s not really a small town. So I think that was the biggest surprise to me is that this really isn’t a small town. Even though we have 800 people in the winter. It’s absolutely not a small town so we don’t have any small town stories. Everything is big and everything’s important.”

The paper is moving online, but Munson isn’t going anywhere. 

“We actually paid $20 for the paper, seemed like a good deal at the time. It actually wasn’t, it was the worst  $20 I’ve ever spent. We certainly don’t do it for the money, but we love what we do. We adore it and I wouldn’t want to be doing anything else and more importantly, I wouldn’t want to be doing it anywhere else.”

Her hopes for the future are modest. 

“I’ve actually never seen a normal Skagway season. I’ve only seen no season or I’ve seen just partial very first seasons. I’ve only seen emergencies. I’ve only seen chaos. And so I’d love to see just normalcy. We haven’t seen that and so we actually don’t know what it’s like to be editors in normal time. I would just really really like to see that.”

For now, the paper can be freely accessed online at skagwaynews.com, the last print edition will come out on December 23rd.