Big changes came to Homer News in 2024, coinciding with the paper’s 60th anniversary. As well as changing ownership earlier this year, the newspaper moved from its longtime home on Landings Street this week. The new office is located at 345 Sterling Highway, Suite 202, above the Pho and Thai restaurant.
With that in mind, and the pending move, I thought now was the perfect time to connect with a few of the former editors and gather some history on Homer News’ operations in the house on Beluga Lake.
Homer News was housed at 3482 Landings Street for nearly 40 years, after moving in in 1987. The office was specifically built for the newspaper’s relocation from a smaller space on Pioneer Avenue — a building that still exists today in the form of the Twisted Goat.
Coincidentally, Homer News’ new office space on the Sterling Highway is less than a half-mile from the old Pioneer Avenue location.
Former managing editor Tom Kizzia, who also had a 25-year career at Anchorage Daily News and is a historian and bestselling author, largely worked for Homer News out of the Pioneer Avenue location except for a short stint in 1989.
“Every time I go in there, I sort of see the ghosts of the ‘70s in there,” he said during an Oct. 7 interview.
That’s a sentiment I can understand, and an image that led me to ask another former managing editor, Joel Gay, and retired editor Michael Armstrong about their time working out of the Landings Street office.
Pieces of Homer News history were recently visible on the pink walls of Landings Street — black and white photographs of reporters and staff huddled together in the newsroom show at least a half dozen employees. The office itself has dedicated spaces that once housed multiple reporters, graphic artists, sales representatives, editorial assistants and a managing editor. The large, open room on the building’s east side — long unoccupied — once bustled with activity on production days as staff worked to put the weekly paper together and send it off for printing. Even the salmon-pink color scheme, I heard from Armstrong, was a holdover from the building’s construction, when former editor and publisher Tom Gibboney’s wife, Kathe, read about color theory and, looking for colors that were calming and soothing, concluded that this ubiquitous pink would be the most calming color to have in a work environment.
After spending nearly the last two years surrounded by salmon-pink in the newsroom, I must say — Kathe, you’re not wrong.
Josh O’Connor, president of Homer News’ parent company Sound Publishing and senior vice president with Carpenter Media, who acquired Sound Publishing earlier this year, shared a comment last Thursday that Landings Street served Homer News’ interests “very well” over the last several decades, but the building is now too large for the paper’s needs today. Looking at our staff of four — two full-time reporters working locally and a sales manager and an editor splitting her time between Homer and Kenai — it’s an unavoidable truth. The nature of print journalism is changing — has been changing for years — and while Homer News remains steadfast in the community, while walking through the quiet, empty spaces of the Landings Street office, it’s hard not to think about what journalism in Homer once looked and felt like.
Gay studied journalism at the University of New Mexico, which he graduated from in late 1976. He visited Homer that year because Kizzia, a “good friend,” was managing editor then. He returned to Homer for good in 1978 and started working for Homer News as a typesetter. At that time, the paper was still housed on Pioneer Avenue. He graduated to staff writer in 1980 and became managing editor in 1985 — a position he held until he left the paper in 1989, after the Exxon-Valdez oil spill. He then wrote for Homer News as a freelancer from 1989 until 2002.
“I wrote fish stories, I worked on special issues,” he said. “I came back as managing editor for a while, then I decided I wanted to step back, and I gave up that position and was a reporter again.”
Overall, Gay’s career with Homer News culminated in nearly 25 years.
“I did everything — as a matter of fact my first job was cleaning up. I was a janitor. I’d go in on Wednesday morning after they had finished up (production) and I would clean up and deliver papers. It was a long relationship,” he said.
When the paper moved to Landings Street in 1987, Gay said that then-editor Tom Gibboney “just came in and said, ‘We’re moving.’”
“It was a done deal. And truthfully, I was not at all happy about the idea — we were on Pioneer Avenue, right in the middle of things. People would stop by all the time, just to drop off a tip or to say, ‘Hey, did you know?’” Gay said. “Gibboney wanted to get away from the social aspect of being on Pioneer Avenue, and I was thinking about it from a journalistic perspective.”
Regardless of social or journalistic impacts, Homer News was truly in need of a new home.
When Gay first became employed at the paper, Homer News was housed in one half of the building, and the other half housed an art gallery. At the time, the paper employed a staff of six to eight in what he illustrated as cramped quarters.
“It was just so crowded. In the back room, there were a couple of light tables and three of us working, and then sometimes there’d be a fourth person just because we were kind of overloaded. We were always bumping into each other,” Gay said.
“On a Tuesday, when things were really hopping, we had about three reporters, the managing editor, a business person (and) Gibboney. I remember the floors were so uneven, when we got rolling chairs, they would roll to the middle of the room sometimes.
“We were right alongside this tiny creek, and in the fall when it was raining, we could hear the water in our heater ducts. The water was right underneath us. We were just cheek by jowl, and at that time, very few people who worked at the Homer News had running water, so there was about six or eight of us who used the showers on a regular basis. I think that’s what Gibboney wanted to get away from.”
At the same time, the atmosphere Gay illustrated sounded nostalgically electric. He described how the reporters — who were “really into jitterbug dancing” — would push the tables aside and dance for about 15 minutes and then get back to work, sometimes until two or three in the morning.
“In the old building, you could be standing in the back working, and you were about 20 feet away from the nearest reporter and 25 feet away from the editor’s desk,” he said. “So you just yelled back and forth. Then in the new building, we had this really nice phone system, and we were so far apart.
“When I was managing editor there, I was constantly walking back and forth — I had to be talking to the reporters and then the editor, and then going back and checking with the ad people, and then come back to see what’s going on with the reporters. I don’t know how many steps I put it, but it was a lot of steps.”
Gay said that moving into the Landings Street office was “amazing — it was warm and dry and spacious.” He also recalled, however, that with the office now being so far removed from the town center, the paper missed out on some key happenings.
“I remember hearing that our governor at that time, Jay Hammond, had come into Homer and spent the day there, and we never even heard about it,” he said. “If we had been on Pioneer, he would have come by the newspaper. So it was a double-edged sword.”
One of the best things about the new building, though, according to both Gay and Armstrong, was ice skating.
According to Gay, several Homer News staff kept skating gear at the office, and as soon as Beluga Lake froze over, they were among the first people every winter to take advantage of the ice.
“I loved that,” he said. “I skated as much as I could — lunchtime, after work, on weekends. That was cool.”
The tradition carried over into Armstrong’s time at Homer News. He also described how staff would bring their skates to work and go skating at lunch as soon as Beluga Lake was frozen enough.
Armstrong started at Homer News in May 1999 as an editorial assistant. He became a reporter in May 2003, then worked as the paper’s editor starting in July 2017 until his retirement in December 2022.
Homer News had about a dozen employees when he started as an editorial assistant, including editor and publisher Mark Turner, general manager Gary Thomas, Gay as managing editor, a sales representative, two graphic artists, a delivery person, two editorial assistants and three reporters.
“You had Joel and three reporters in the newsroom, and then I shared a desk with the other editorial assistant, (who) a couple days a week would be up at the front desk taking ads, and on Wednesdays shifted to the back and helped with layout,” he said.
Armstrong described the weekly news cycle as, on Thursday mornings when the paper came out, the “rock was at the top of the hill — and then it rolled back down, and you had to start rolling it up again.” He described one particular Thursday in the newsroom when he and former reporter Hal Spence were listening to the float plane engines on Beluga Lake. One plane was especially loud, and Armstrong and Spence tried to figure out how many RPMs the prop would have to go to hit the speed of light.
“Joel just got disgusted and said, ‘Guys, you don’t have work to do?’ That was the kind of thing that would happen on a Thursday,” he said. “But on Mondays and Tuesdays it got very intense, and I remember this newsroom as being — you’re taking phone calls and you’re trying to do so in a way where you don’t talk loudly and bother other people.
“When it hit Tuesday, there was just this hum as people were finishing up their stories … and all I could hear the clicking of the computer keys. It was kind of a cool moment, everybody’s in the groove, everybody’s in their zone, and you’re getting the paper out.”
Wednesday was “deadline day,” when the paper would be laid out in the back room.
“We were doing it with wax, the old-school method. Three of the walls had light tables, and there was a waxing machine going, always filled with wax. The graphic artists would be in there working on their ads,” Armstrong said. “So Wednesday comes along, and we’re doing layout. We’d print the grayscale pages out on the laser printer and proofread, and if the page was fine you took it to the back and the graphic artist laid it out.
“About midday, all you’re really doing it proofing stories, and Turner would go in and take one last look and try to catch stupid errors, like the one time we didn’t spell the headline correctly — six sets of eyes missed that one.”
After the pages were finished and signed off on, they went into a cardboard box. Color elements were saved on hard drive disks. The paper was then driven up to Kenai to go to press at the Peninsula Clarion.
“There was this kind of excitement — the paper was put to bed when it was wrapped up in this little box and went out the door. Then you could relax,” Armstrong said. “We were usually starting at about 7 a.m., maybe 8 a.m., and working until about 3 p.m. It had to be on the road to the Clarion at 3 p.m.”
This newsroom experience changed over the years at Homer News lost staff, whether due to outsourcing positions or positions being vacated and then left unfilled. Armstrong said that in his later career, aside from himself, Homer News employed a front desk person, another reporter and a salesperson. Graphics and layout were done off-site. Eventually, staff consisted of Armstrong, a second reporter and an advertising representative — a masthead not entirely dissimilar to what Homer News has today.
Introspection
Last Thursday was my final day in the office on Landings Street. The sun was beginning to set when I left that evening, and a cold wind blew autumn leaves over the quiet lake.
I think a lot about Tom Kizzia saying he “sees the ghosts” of the past when revisiting places that now hold new things. Even before we got the notice that we were moving, I had felt that many times while working in the old office. It’s a mildly bittersweet feeling — the memories are writ on the space, in the arrangement of desks or photos on the walls or old equipment stacked in the back storage room. It’s easy to imagine the energy that once flowed through these rooms with so much evidence of it left behind. The remaining stillness makes it all the more striking.
It might seem silly to be so attached to a building — it’s just an office, after all. We’re moving into a new, comfortable space that is closer to the town center, more in the thick of things rather than tucked away along Beluga Lake where the float plane engines drown out voices in the middle of an interview. Homer is experiencing some exciting times — sister city celebrations, comprehensive plan rewrites, the election of a new mayor, cautious but continued growth. Homer News will keep doing what it’s been doing, being an outlet for community news and connection.
But I see the ghosts of what once was, too.
I started working for Homer News as a freelancer in the late fall of 2017. I was in my second year of my undergraduate degree and trying to find some kind of employment that was actually related to writing, rather than food service or whatever else was available at the time. You know how young writers are desperate to build a portfolio and get their name out there somehow.
When I walked into the Homer News office and met Michael Armstrong and then-reporter Megan Pacer, who now works for the Anchorage Daily News, in the newsroom painted a pink that I could only have called “surprising,” I had no idea what stories I wanted to write. My journalistic experience to that point was one class I took in my senior year of high school where stories were a maximum of 300 words and I mostly wrote about my classmates’ favorite recipes to make. I knew the basics — inverted pyramid, the five W’s and an H (who, what, when, where, why and how), how to write a headline. All of my other writing experience was related to fictional prose and poetry.
I talked to Michael and Megan and passed over the 300-word writing sample I’d brought along. I told them that I liked “telling people’s stories,” learning about a person and presenting it to readers in an understandable, written form. Michael said I could write features for the paper — but they needed to be longer than 300 words.
The first story I wrote was a spotlight on another Semester By the Bay cohort finishing out the fall with Dr. Debbie Tobin at Kachemak Bay Campus. The next was a profile of Jeffery Johnson, who had just been hired as KBC’s new mathematics professor after the retirement of Sara Reinert. Each rounded out to about 1,000 words.
I was good at proofreading, so in addition to writing copy I came in occasionally to help out on production days. In the newsroom, with the lights turned off except a lamp and strings of white and colored Christmas lights pinned to the walls, Megan was stationed at a desktop doing layout, and I sat at an open desk with a red pen and 11-by-17-inch pages that she’d printed off and checked over them for typos and other egregious errors before passing them off to Michael for a second proof.
Landings Street is where I learned to be a reporter. The practical skills I picked up or was taught as a freelancer helped when I applied for a full-time reporting position and was hired in January 2023. I’m grateful to still be here, telling Homer’s stories.
Because that’s what a journalist is, isn’t it? A storyteller. Yes, there are guidelines to follow according to AP Style and measures to take to preserve the integrity of the news. There’s no room for unreliability in journalism — but at its heart, the job is telling other people’s stories.
And even as I packed up my things on Thursday and took one last walk around the building, snapping photos with my phone of all the rooms now dark and empty as a reminder of what once was here, I looked forward to the next week when we would be in a new place but doing the same, wonderful job — writing about Homer news.
The former Homer News office building, located at 3482 Landings Street, is photographed on Thursday, Oct. 17, 2024, in Homer, Alaska. (Delcenia Cosman/Homer News)
The former Homer News office building, located at 3482 Landings Street, is photographed on Thursday, Oct. 17, 2024, in Homer, Alaska. (Delcenia Cosman/Homer News)
Delcenia Cosman/Homer News The location of the new Homer News office, at 345 Sterling Highway, Suite 202, is photographed Tuesday. The office, situated on the second floor of the the Pho and Thai building, opened to the public this week.
