Juneau Independent

Five journalists who spent first half of 2025 at the Juneau Empire before launching the Independent explain how winning entries at both publications originated and were written.

In mid-April I went out on the Airport Dike Trail, hoping to find some fat buds that were loosening up and showing a little green leafiness. Alas, no, too soon for that. My best observation for that walk happened out by the bench.

All that snow — over 16 feet of it! We shoveled. We dealt carefully with the blind junctions, where huge snow berms meant you couldn’t see the cross traffic until you pulled your car well out into their lane. We shoveled again and we dreamed of spring.

Robust competition including gunplay and fisticuffs, notable contributions from Alaska Natives, and two previous ‘Independent’ newspapers among capital city’s chronicles

Two websites publish articles on Easter with AI-generated content, including fake pictures of Alaska Native celebrations; one of the stories vanishes after the Independent asks about it By Mark Sabbatini Juneau Independent Juneau’s not typically a place tourists begin a road or rail tour of Alaska, the town’s Maritime Festival is in May rather than June, and that photo is…well, definitely unreal. Two articles about visiting Alaska’s capital city published at travel websites o

Many years ago, when I cooked dinners on Friday nights at the AWARE shelter, this casserole was hands down a resident favorite.

Trio restoring 86-year-old building set to debut Aurora Grand Theater for movie screenings this month and future live stage performances.

These strange little critters are in their own phylum, distantly related to arthropods and round worms. There are over a thousand species of them, distributed in various habitats around the world; over 80 species are known from Alaska. So small that they are almost invisible to our unaided eyes, most of them are less than a millimeter long.

April's First Friday will feature book signing, ceramics exhibition, and visual art shows.

When a new bumblebee queen emerges from her natal nest in late summer or early fall, she makes a so-called ‘nuptial’ flight.

What could be better than a cake shaped into a crown?

The insect order Hymenoptera includes wasps and bees. Bees evolved from a waspish ancestor a long time ago and constitute a separate lineage, which is not the focus of this essay, although some comparisons are quite interesting.