Write Hard, Die Free

Book excerpt: When he fell in love with newspapering at the Anchorage Daily News, Howard Weaver was an untested twenty-one-year-old cub reporter from a blue-collar neighborhood in America's farthest-north big city: His home state of Alaska was on the cusp of great change. By the time Weaver moved on twenty-three years later he'd led the paper to the most unlikely David and Goliath upset in the history of American newspaper competition and helped win two Pulitzer Prizes. He spent time with small-town hoodlums and big-time politicians and crossed swords with both Big Oil and Big Labor as he rose from foot soldier to field marshal in the Great Alaska Newspaper War. Weaver's journey encompassed the defining political struggles of the era-from oil development to Native sovereignty, from parkland designations to environmental activism. His newspaper pulled no punches then, and Weaver has pulled none in this definitive account of the fierce and sometimes funny fight to the finish against the long-dominant Anchorage Times. The Author: A former editor of the Anchorage Daily News and later vice president for news for the McClatchy Company's thirty-one daily newspapers, Howard Weaver lives with his wife Barbara Hodgin in the Sierra foothills of central California. Book jacket.