Early every Wednesday morning, around 2 or 3 a.m., 29-year-old Jenny Neyman sits in her car in the parking lot of the Anchorage Daily News’s Soldotna office, waiting for a truck to arrive. Besides its load of ADN copies, the truck carries 3,500 copies of Neyman’s Kenai Peninsula community newspaper, the Redoubt Reporter. After she picks up the papers, it’s back home for an hour or two of sleep, and Neyman’s back up at 5:30 or so to begin the nine hour process of distributing the papers to locations spread across the peninsula.

Neyman, a former reporter for the Peninsula Clarion, started the free weekly in August of last year. She’s had some help—her longtime friend Joe Rizzo sells ads for her (and was a huge advocate of Neyman launching the paper), as do a couple of others; Clark Fair, a retired teacher and former Clarion reporter, writes for the paper; others in the community contribute pieces as well—but for the most part the little community paper is Neyman’s labor of love. After getting out of the journalism game once, she’s done what many young, earnest reporters dream of, and started her own newspaper.

At a time when the newspaper industry is floundering—trying to find a new revenue model in the digital age—Neyman’s endeavor has been a success by her measure. “I didn’t start this to make money,” she says, “so when people ask if it’s successful I think that’s what they mean, but my version of why I started this is I really like journalism. People say ‘media’ like it’s a four-letter word these days, and it means you’re out to get somebody or you’re hiding in the bushes to take pictures of Britney Spears, or you’re the liberal media or the conservative media and all these horrible things. What I enjoy about it is the aspect of shining a light on the community. I know how hokey that sounds, but somehow that Journalism 101 idealism didn’t quite get beat out of me.”

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Neyman was born and raised in the Southeast community of Wrangell. While in high school she contributed to the Wrangell Sentinel—“the oldest continuously published paper in Alaska,” according to its website—which earned her a journalism scholarship to Whitworth University (then Whitworth College), a private liberal arts college in Spokane, Washington. Journalism wasn’t exactly a passion for her then, but it kept the tuition coming. When she needed to declare a major in her junior year, she put scraps of paper on a dartboard with three options: history, technical theater, and journalism. “I probably aimed as well as I could have,” she says. “History, I’d be working at Taco Bell; technical theater, who knows what I was thinking there.”

Rizzo, her friend from back in Wrangell, had moved to the Kenai area, and when Neyman needed to do an internship in her junior year, he hooked her up with an editor at the Clarion, and Neyman was able to stay with Rizzo and his wife over the summer while she interned.

She returned to Spokane and earned her degree in 2001. The journalism game in that area wasn’t looking so hot, she says. The newspaper there, the Spokesman-Review, had laid off quite a few reporters, so students graduating from j-school were competing with seasoned veterans for jobs. But there was an opening at the Clarion, so Neyman headed back to the peninsula.

“I did it all,” she says of her time at the Clarion. “I started off as general assignment, arts and entertainment, and city of Kenai. There was a brief stint at cops and courts. And I kind of taught myself layout when I was there; that became progressively more and more of my job description. Once somebody realizes you’re competent at something, you’re doing it from then on.”

But after six years the luster of being a reporter had began to fade. “It’s not a profession where you make a lot of money or you’re comfortable,” Neyman says. “It’s horrible hours; you’re overworked; the stress is ridiculous; every last thing you do is under a microscope. There’s really no other job where you make a tiny little mistake and you’re getting calls about it for the next three days. All the crap you put up with with journalism, if you don’t honestly feel like you’re doing it for a good reason and you’re doing a good thing and you’re enjoying it, it’s tough to stay in that business. I was getting to that point, and I got out of it.”

Neyman quit the Clarion in August 2007 and took a communications job with the Kenai Peninsula School District. But it turned out the journalism bug wasn’t quite out of her system.

While Neyman worked for the school district, she pondered the possibility of launching her own newspaper, with a community focus. She wrote a business plan and tinkered away at it. “It took me months and months to decide,” she says. “I just kept tweaking my business plan so it felt like I was doing something useful, so I have a gorgeous business plan.”

She started looking for a loan, but that proved daunting since she’d never owned a home or a new car, and didn’t have a loan history. Eventually she went to the Small Business Administration, which hooked her up with a loan, but a smaller one than she’d asked for. Her parents bought her a Mac mini computer and publishing software. She shopped around to find the cheapest shop to print her paper. (Disclosure: The Redoubt Reporter is printed on the presses at the Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman, owned by Wick Communications, the parent company of the Anchorage Press.)

After a brutal 48 hours with barely any sleep for Neyman, the Redoubt Reporter became a reality on August 6, 2007.

The debut issue had stories about peninsula fisherman waiting for their settlement from Exxon, a commercial fishing season recap, a brown bear getting friendly with people at Jim’s Landing, a Soldotna rodeo family, a piece by Fair about homesteaders who had to dig wells for water, and a profile of summer street vendors, among other pieces.

Neyman also penned a column about the new newspaper and her plunge into the unknown.

“I’ve never been one of those throw-caution-to-the-wind, leap-before-you-look, fly-without-a-safety-net kind of people,” she wrote. “I’ve never hitchhiked across the street, much less the country; never backpacked through Europe; never moved somewhere for any reason other than college or employment. I’ve never even been without at least a summer job since I was 13 years old. 

“And now look at me: unemployed. Or, rather, self-employed, but at the moment it feels like the same thing.”

What Neyman’s doing with the Redoubt Reporter is a sometimes-maligned facet of the media: community journalism. That term’s spoken with disdain in many newsrooms—your average

community newspaper doesn’t do “big” stories; they can be prone to covering “safe” stories that won’t piss off anyone in their small tightly-knit communities. But Neyman’s goal is to reflect her community.

When asked what stories have been her favorites, Neyman says that her favorite stories are the ones where she talks to people who aren’t usually in the news. “If they tell you they’ve never been interviewed before, or are surprised you think they’re ‘worthy’ of doing a story on them, that’s a good indication you’ve found a genuine, no BS person who’s doing something because they think it’s important, not because it’ll get them good PR.”

Neyman’s says her favorite compliment came from a young mother in her early twenties working at a coffee shack in Kasilof. About a month into the paper’s existence, Neyman had gone to grab old editions from the shack and throw them away, but the young mom stopped her, saying she was saving them because she knew someone in every issue.

“I think it’s easy in journalism to get hung up on ‘important’ people—politicians, business leaders, spokesmen and PR people,” Neyman says. “And here’s a woman completely outside the ‘important’ realm saving my papers because I’d included people who were important to her. I remember thinking that no matter what happens with the paper from there on out, I’d already accomplished what I’d hoped to accomplish.”

Recently Neyman’s written about a cancer survivor who started a charity and raises money for the cancer fund at Central Peninsula hospital by putting a donation jug at Soldotna High; she wrote a series looking at possible Homer Electric Association hydroelectric projects near Moose Pass; and she wrote a piece about a Skyview High School teen girl who got an educational scholarship from the National Rifle Asssociation.

“I’m happy doing the small weekly, talking to local folks,” Neyman says. “I think the fourth estate end of [journalism] is noble and great, but on some level every story boils down to people. [After quitting the Clarion] I missed having a reason to BS with people. My life is so boring. I’ve never really done anything; I’ve never been anywhere; I’ve never been involved with anything momentous, but when you’re a writer or reporter you get to talk to people who are all the time. There’s no better way to live vicariously than if you’re a reporter.”

The community has been supportive in return. Besides Rizzo and a couple other people selling ads, a guy named Chris Jenness designs ads for the Reporter, Fair contributes historical stories and profiles, a local attorney named Joseph Kashi writes a column about computers and technology, local art gallery owner and artist Zirrus VanDevere writes about fine arts. “These are all great people, super respected,” Neyman says. “When I started this I didn’t have the nerve to go around and ask people to do things for me for free. When they contacted me and said, ‘hey, why don’t I do this for you,’ it was wonderful. I keep naming goldfish and betas after them because it’s all I can do.”

After picking up the papers early Wednesday morning and distributing them throughout the day to over 50 locations, Neyman gets caught up on paperwork Wednesday night and posts the paper's contents online at redoubtreporter.blogspot.com. Thursdays and Fridays she does as many interviews as possible. On weekends she does most of her writing, and Mondays she’s hustling to catch up with whoever she hasn’t been able to reach. Monday nights she starts the paper’s layout, and her deadline for printing is noon on Tuesday.

Deadlines can be tough for any reporter, and with so many responsibilities, Neyman’s sometimes left scrambling. One Tuesday morning, with only a few hours until her deadline, Neyman still needed a business story. She drove around looking for any business that was open that she could get some sort of story about. She finally found a restaurant, which wasn’t even technically open yet but had an unlocked front door. The place had just reopened with a new name and new menu. “I pretty much just tackled the woman—‘You’ve gotta tell me about this place right now!’ She did, and I got a little story in there. You do what you’ve gotta do to get the thing out.”

Lest anyone think that the Redoubt Reporter is some sort of response to her former employer, the Peninsula Clarion, Neyman is quick to dispel that notion. “It would be unfortunate if that was the perception,” she says. Clarion publisher Stan Pitlo declined to comment for this story.

Although Neyman once thought she was through with journalism, this time around she’s determined to see her little community weekly succeed. She doesn’t have health insurance or a retirement plan, and she won’t be buying a home or taking a vacation any time soon, but “I’m intending that this is what I’m doing,” she says. “It’d be pretty insane to put this work into something that’s only going to last a year. I wanted to prove to myself that this could work, and you could do the type of journalism I like to do and it could be well received and it could matter and people actually could want to read it. And it seems, at least so far, that that’s the case.”

bjk@anchoragepress.com