Carpenter Media’s Ominous Takeover of Local News

In just a few years, a publisher based in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, has become the country’s fourth-largest newspaper operator. Some reporters wonder if it isn’t the cruelest.

On a late-September evening in the small coastal town of Homer, Alaska, a reporter named Chloe Pleznac prepared to cover a memorial honoring Charlie Kirk. She was nervous, sensing that many of Kirk’s supporters might prefer that she, as a member of the press, not be there at all. Pleznac—who is twenty-five, circumspect and earnest, with sea-colored eyes—had grown up in Homer. After working at a radio station in Juneau, she was thrilled to land a position at the Homer News. It paid less than working the fry station at McDonald’s, but she considered getting the job a stroke of luck. She chronicled fishery openings, cat rescues, planning commission meetings, high school sports—civic mortar. “These are my people. This is my community,” she said. “There are so few platforms here to tell these stories.”

She also understood, with the clarity that comes from wading through the steady drip of small-town rumor, that some corners of Homer saw the paper as having a liberal bias. When Sarah Vance, a Republican state representative, posted plans for the Kirk vigil on Facebook, Pleznac thought the event could provide a chance to hear from conservatives. On a rocky beach, where a few hundred people gathered, she fought a creeping sense of self-consciousness. Cassie Lawver, the founder of a local conservative political action committee, began by warning what to do if there was a shooting at the event. “Stay where you’re at, and if it gets hectic, just kind of hit the ground,” she said. Pleznac, who had been more worried about a verbal confrontation than gun violence, was alarmed.