“Funemployment” is the silly new term being bandied about by various media outlets to describe those laid off in the Great Recession who are taking advantage of their free time, starting blogs, and apparently racking up their credit card balances.

Former Anchorage Daily News Outdoors section editor and reporter Craig Medred is enjoying his own version of funemployment this summer—but his context for funemployment is a bit different. The Great Recession hasn’t hit Alaska particularly hard, unless you work for ADN, which has seen a spate of buyouts and layoffs, plus mandatory furloughs for the employees who remain. But Medred was anxious, eager even, to escape the shrinking property that belongs to the beleaguered McClatchy chain of newspapers.

And what better a summer to be funemployed if you’re an outdoors freak? We’re having the best weather many of us can remember for an Alaska summer. Just in the last week or so Medred hiked to Blacktail Rocks with another former ADN-er, Josh Niva; pedaled his mountain bike to the top of Rendezvous Peak above Alpenglow (which might be illegal, he notes) then rode downhill through the brush; he put 50 miles on his road bike one day; and he’s tinkering with his Ford F250 SuperDuty pickup. In the meantime, he’s been penning columns for AlaskaDispatch.com about the person who followed in his footsteps and quit her job—soon-to-be Ex-Governor Palin. Medred’s final column for ADN ran on June 22, entitled “Screw-ups make us smarter—hopefully,” and recounted some amusing misadventures he’d witnessed over the years, concluding that “Everything we survive makes us smarter,” an intelligent take on the “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” cliché.

After more than a quarter-century with the Daily News, Medred’s been not just a controversial reporter, but also a marquee name in Alaska journalism. Now that he’s left the paper, he hopes that his experiences there—what he survived—will make him, and perhaps others, smarter.

Medred was born in Minnesota, and in the early ‘70s, school wasn’t going so well at the University of Minnesota—his second or third college, he doesn’t recall—plus he’d split up with a girlfriend. On opening day of fishing season in 1973, he got stuck in a traffic jam stretching some 70 miles on an expressway out of Minneapolis. “It was insane,” Medred says. “I got home and told my mom, ‘I’m moving to Alaska.’ She said, ‘what?’” A week or two later Medred loaded his car and headed to Fairbanks.

When he arrived, he realized there wasn’t much in Fairbanks. He ate snowshoe hare and grayling and lived in cabins in the White Mountains, until he enrolled at UAF. “UAF got so fed up with me, they said, ‘here, take a degree and leave.’ So I took a degree [in journalism] and left and went to work for [Senator] Mike Gravel for a year in Washington D.C.”

Gravel’s known these days as one of the wackier contenders in the 2008 presidential campaign, and Medred says he was just as wacky then: “He hasn’t changed. He’s no less or no more crazy than Sarah [Palin].” But he also describes Gravel as a man ahead of his time, concerned about terrorists getting their hands on nukes and attacking U.S. cities.

Medred tired of D.C. and it’s summer heat, and Kim Elton—the former Democratic state senator from Juneau who now works in the Obama administration—called him up and asked if he’d like to come back to Alaska. Elton was the editor of the Juneau Empire at the time, and the two had gone to school together and were old friends. “Alaska’s an interesting place for news,” Medred says. “There’s no end of craziness, as we see now. It never ends.”

He spent six or seven years at the Empire, became city editor, but decided he didn’t like management, so he quit. He started a novel, and was living on a boat with his first wife. “The novel made me a little wacky,” he says. “I got divorced; she tried to take all the money; we had a nice messy divorce, and sold the boat with the requirement I sail it back to Anchorage with the new owner. That turned into the craziest time I’d ever spent on the North Pacific.”

In 1983, while Medred was living in Seattle, Howard Weaver, then-editor of the Daily News, called and asked if Medred was looking for work. His first assignment was to follow then-Interior Secretary James Watt, first to Anchorage, then to the Brooks Range. According to Medred, Watt wasn’t very interested in wilderness or wildlife. “He kind of went out like ‘okay, I saw the bear, let’s go.’”

Medred started out at ADN doing a bit of everything, as most reporters were at the time. He has fond memories of partying late into the night with the editor and publisher, and he started writing environmental stories, which eventually segued into outdoors reporting.

 “It shifted as the staff grew and we got people specializing more, and I got my own little niche carved out and it was very comfortable. That was another reason to leave—you shouldn’t get too comfortable. It’s like, ‘okay, I could mail this in, do this in my sleep;’ that’s not what I want to do.”

“I had to sign a gag order as art of the package they give you when you leave,” Medred says. “I asked for a severance package, and Pat [Dougherty, ADN editor], to his credit, said ‘we’ve got it for you,’ and I said ‘great.’ It’s just clear, the future there’s not going to be bright, and it just wasn’t a healthy place to be.”

ADN’s parent company, McClatchy, has suffered financially due to the economy, and due to its purchase of the Knight Ridder chain a few years back. The company’s stock has sunk; it’s tried to unload struggling flagship papers like the Miami Herald, with no success, and profitable midsize-market papers like the Daily News have had to cut staff and shrink to help keep the company afloat. Medred estimates that in the past four years, the number of employees has shrunk by two-thirds.

“None of this should be taken as critical of the Daily News, but it’s people fighting a losing war,” he says. “I would go to work thinking of my high school football team, which lost the homecoming game 64 to nothing. It’s like a bad, bad flashback. At some point you go like, ‘do I go in here, do I get frustrated with the place, do I get angry, do I take all that home, or do I get out?’ And I finally got out.”

In Medred’s mind, the paper’s taken the wrong tack in its current situation. “I’m old school—newspapers exist to raise hell and make money. And I don’t think that in this climate you raise less hell; you raise more hell. You hire good people, you turn ‘em loose to do what they do, and you make experts out of them. One of the few publications that’s surviving today is the Economist, which I read regularly because they do a really good job of having really good people summarize the news for you and tell you what it means. I’d do some of that and I’d get Alaskans in the paper. There’s a lot of policy and not much people [in the ADN].”

Medred’s ADN articles were known for being curmudgeonly, and it resulted in some memorable confrontations: yelling matches with musher Rick Swenson on the Iditarod trail, for one, then there’s the guy who tried to fight him at 14,000 feet on Mount McKinley. “He didn’t like a story I’d once written,” Medred says. “We’re standing there in the snow and somebody’s saying, ‘you’re that guy?’ ‘Yeah, I’m that guy.’ ‘I oughtta punch your lights out.’ ‘Okay, let’s go! I’ve got a shovel in my hand, I think I’ve got an edge here, let’s have that out right now.’

“It was those kinds of things, being out in Alaska and around Alaskans… we have really interesting people here, it’s really fun to talk to them. I still like to just go out and talk to people, and it’s somewhat nicer to go out and talk to people now. I’m starting to lose some of that attachment—I would hate it when people would recognize me, it just got in the way. I don’t wanna talk about me, or something I wrote; I wanna talk about you.”

So nowadays, Medred’s enjoying his funemployment (though he also says he’s a really good carpenter, if anyone’s looking). Still, he says, “it’s hard to let go, that’s what I’m finding out. You get so used to getting up and filing all the time, that to not be writing every day seems odd. You get conditioned, you’re like a dog that goes to the same place every day, so you wanna get to a keyboard and start writing.” Hence his political—well, Palin, really—pieces for the Alaska Dispatch.

Medred says he thought about going back to school for a degree in psychology, “just because I’ve watched so many of these things in Alaska everyone wants explained. There’s a lot of things in life there’s no explanation for—let’s face it, people just do weird shit. They’re no different from bears; you can predict most of them most of the time but every now and then they just go and do weird shit, and you go, ‘why the hell did she do that?’ If you love journalism, it makes [Alaska] an irresistible place to live. There’s just nowhere in the world that the kind of strange stuff happens that happens here.”

bjk@anchoragepress.com