Notes On The News: Elements of starting a newspaper, from picking a name to picking fonts

What editing the Independent’s website looks like.

This is about the "how" of launching the Juneau Independent (i.e. how Kepler got picked as the font for the "Juneau Independent" banner), not the "why" (i.e. fleeing the wrecking ball about to hit the Juneau Empire in order to ensure the community continues to have a locally produced newspaper).

It doesn’t start with the name, since lots of things occur to reach that decision point. But this overview starts there since that’s necessary to start doing practical work such as registering a website, applying for a business license and asking people to write content for a publication you’re actually able to name.

Among the many rejections were Juneau Empress, Juneau Quill and Juneau Sentinel (the latter a shameless hat-tip/ripoff of the Mat-Su Sentinel launched last year as an alternative to the Wasilla-based Frontiersman). Deciding on Juneau Independent didn’t come during a couple of brainstorming sessions with a couple of friends — it was instantly decided by the rather anti-independent tone of a discussion with the Empire’s new corporate management during my final weeks there.

The next obvious step was registering the juneauindependent.com domain name, as well as juneauindependent.org and juneauindependent.net to prevent lookalike troll sites. Also getting a business license, applying to form as a nonprofit media organization (the latter is pending and getting tax-exempt status can take a while) and other bureaucratic details.

Then comes the big stuff: What kind of news and other content to include, how should all of it look on a website, and how to do all that from scratch in three weeks while also going full-tilt as editor of the Juneau Empire (since any dropoff in content/quality of that paper should be noticeable after I depart, not before)?

The most important component was an intent to simply keep doing what I was doing at the Empire — covering and publishing as much local news as possible — only now without a paywall. An initial goal when I became editor there was greatly expanding the number of columnists to represent a broader range of the community, but that fell through due to early chaos during the first few months — and not enough page space for lots of opinion writers.

The issue of print space is moot with an online newspaper, so I began asking a wide range of people about writing for the Independent. Among my priorities was asking people who have at times strongly disagreed with my reporting, yet presented their arguments intelligently, factually and without hyperbole.

In addition to news and opinions, I wanted to run some weekly (or at least regular) feature items. Among them are Consuming Juneau (a consumer feature I initiated while working at the Empire in the 1990s), Random Bits of Weirdness (a collection of strange items from the past week that originated with a newspaper I published for 13 years in the Norwegian Arctic) and AI Tries To Write The News (based on a couple of stories published during the week by the Independent, so people can compare and know how to recognize such content).

Next comes building a website from scratch, beginning with picking a host platform.

Some notable independent Alaska publications such as the Mat-Su Sentinel and Northern Journal use a platform called Ghost. That therefore seemed like an obvious default choice, and I paid about $200 to sign up and purchase a news website template in the hopes it would shortcut a lot of design work.

It ended up being the first of many errant steps to come, since it turns out Ghost had no practical way to handle a large number of guest contributors. Without getting too technical, anyone with a byline essentially has to register as a contributor, which in addition to being cumbersome wasn’t going to work for some people writing for the Independent such as a refugee using a pen name.

So I switched over to a platform called Wix, which while a bit expensive is also impressively comprehensive at designing websites, publishing content (far more flexible than the Empire in terms of including multimedia for instance), and handling payments/accounting. Still, even with drag-and-drop design software a lot of stuff is trial and error much like assembling a jigsaw puzzle.

I was told a logo and banner font for "Juneau Independent" were important because of the first impression they make. There’s no logo yet — a person I hoped would design one got thwarted by other work prior to the site’s launch. As for the Kepler-font banner, that was simply about going through previews using the entire font list on my computer with a couple of other people, and going with what the three of us generally agreed looked best.

I couldn’t begin active work on the Independent until my departure from the Empire was official, which occurred last Monday afternoon (a day earlier than planned since I was essentially fired when word of my resignation became public). I had decided the Independent would debut at 6 a.m. Friday (deadlines are always essential for a journalist) giving me about three and a half days to get all the pieces in place before launch. Meanwhile, since notable news was happening during the week I also chose to publish major stories — such as the police and city dismantling a homeless encampment — at the Independent’s Facebook page. It turned out to be one of my better decisions since there was tremendous reader interest — the homeless camp post has more than 50,000 views as of Saturday — that built up awareness for the impending website launch.

But even though I’ve been a journalist for nearly 40 years — and when I started doing paid work in 1987 I was a news editor doing some of the first-ever computer pagination for a college newspaper — there’s no shortcuts and no glamour getting a new project started. During the 48 hours between Wednesday morning and the Friday launch I got about four hours of sleep while spending the vast majority of my time at my home "office" doing the hundreds of things necessary from setting up individual writer bios to ensuring all stories were appearing in their proper formatting and locations at the website.

There was also all the writing and proofreading of content by others. I had assistance with the latter during the final all-nighter from an unnamed person who really deserves full public credit for that monumental feat and support at some point.

The site launched on time (or technically speaking, a couple minutes past 6 a.m.), but this column in its finished form was the last thing undone. It turns out that was fitting, since the 48 hours since the launch have involved a lot of "shakedown" adjustments. A couple people saying they are getting security notices about the site. Sudden glitches with the Facebook page that made links to stories not work and certain posts to automatically republish themselves repeatedly (I still don’t know what that’s about).

But as of this writing (Sunday shortly before 10 a.m.), the Independent’s website is essentially at the point where I can resume doing what my primary intent was all along: just keep reporting the news the way I have been for the past two years.

Subsequent columns will get into the seemingly infinite and always-changing aspects of that process. That includes things like deciding what to cover when multiple things are happening at once; the differences between updates/clarifications/corrections and when to make them; the incredibly precise wording decisions/definitions used at times for legal or other purposes; getting story pitches from people that interest me vs. those that don’t; and much, much more.

• Contact Mark Sabbatini at editor@juneauindependent.com or (907) 957-2306.