User:B.anderson.425/Alaska Dispatch

Alaska Dispatch is an online news website based in Anchorage, Alaska.

History
Founded in 2008 as a blog by longtime Alaskan reporters - and husband and wife - Tony Hopfinger and Amanda Coyne, the site became a legitimate news source in 2009, when Alice Rogoff, a former Chief Financial Officer of U.S. News and World Report and wife of Carlyle Group founder David M. Rubenstein, committed to financing Alaska Dispatch. With the goal of becoming a for-profit, online-only news website, the staff has expanded to include several veteran Alaskan reporters from a variety of other Alaska news outlets, including the Anchorage Daily News, the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, and KTUU, the NBC television affiliate in Anchorage.

Praise and Controversy
Alaska Dispatch has drawn praise from other media outlets for its journalism and investigative reporting. The Columbia Journalism Review has called Alaska Dispatch "an online regional reporting powerhouse," while the American Journalism Review said in late 2010 that the site was "steadily developing a reputation for its gritty coverage." The site earned lauds for its coverage of the Gulf Coast oil spill of 2010 and the Point Hope Caribou Massacre, in which dozens of caribou were left for dead following a subsistence hunt in rural Alaska.

Alaska Dispatch has also been at the center of several media controversies. During the 2010 Alaska Senate race, security guards for candidate Joe Miller detained Alaska Dispatch co-founder and editor-in-chief Tony Hopfinger during an event at a public school