VIII. Epilogue: Telling stories around the tribal fire At the Anchorage Daily News, editors use a metaphor to explain to journalists why they should become storytellers rather than simple purveyors of facts. It is called the story of the tribal fire: In ancient days, members of the tribe gathered for warmth and companionship around a tribal fire. Here it was that they told one another stories--of the successful hunt, of the difficult birthing, of the strange encounter--and by so doing shaped the group identity. In the telling and hearing of these stories, the group was melded into a tribe. Where is that tribal fire today? Where do people gather to hear the stories that bind their separate identities into one? When thinking of media as "tribal fire," the most obvious choice is to consider television. It seems on first impression to have the perfect attributes: a vast, shared audience; the ability not only to tell but to display stories, complete with dramatic moving pictures; an emotional (rather than reflective) appeal. But the evidence of everyday experience--growing fragmentation, the breakdown of community cohesion, individual isolation--suggests that television has failed in this role, its potential as a tribal fire largely unrealized. As one American journalist has observed, "The flickering box yields an unsteady light, and strangely little heat" (Mary Ann Dolan, personal communication). Journalists at the Anchorage Daily News are asked to think of their newspaper as the tribal fire of the Alaska community it serves. The effort is both specific and indirect. A weekly magazine entitled We Alaskans seeks explicitly to appeal to a sense of group identity among Alaskans, concentrating on the myth-making activities that allow an accountant or dentist to imagine himself a frontiersman: sled dog races, wilderness log cabins, mountain climbing. In other sections, the newspaper seeks special geographical and cultural cues. The Daily News attempts to have in every issue a sense of place; every reader should be able to tell without knowing in advance that this newspaper is specially focused on a particular, singular place: Alaska. It is not to become a generic newspaper. It belongs to a specific tribe: Alaskans. To accomplish this requires two things: stories to tell, and a place to share the telling of them. Writers can provide the former by thinking of themselves not simply as journalists, but as storytellers. The newspaper endeavors to create the latter, becoming a shared environment where those stories can be told: a tribal fire around which Alaskans can pursue their myths. A similar if unstated impulse may have been key in the formation and sustaining of the Northern News Service, as well. Journalists from around the north felt a sense of kinship based on geography but had no context for sharing it. An illuminating moment came on the tarmac at the Noril'sk airport on an afternoon in August, 1989, as journalists from Norway, Sweden, Finland, Canada and Alaska joined Russians for a tour of the region. The air was thick with komary--mosquitoes--and the attacking insects quickly became the focus of conversation. Before long, a Norwegian mentioned that these bugs really weren't so bad; if you wanted to see really bad mosquitoes, you ought to visit Norway. "Oh yeah?" a Canadian replied. "Nobody can have worse mosquitoes than Yellowknife in the summer ..." And so it began. Swapping stories, exchanging myths ("How cold was it, anyway?") and building a shared identity as Northerners, regardless of national boundary. Time and again Russians listened to the stories of visitors, nodding affirmatively and saying "North is North." Here again the sense of place: All the same. One region. One tribe. Viewed in the context of this defining metaphor, it is unsurprising that the NNS would develop the "atypical vocabulary." Indeed, it could hardly have done anything else. NNS left unreported much about life in the North that would be considered "newsworthy" by traditional definitions, but there was little incentive among the journalists of the NNS to share tales of sewer systems or council elections or the routine ebb and flow of commerce. Such mundane activities might sustain the tribe, but they do not define it. Instead it has looked for the things that made the North special: the timeless cycle of indigenous hunters and migrating caribou; Yupik speakers in Siberia and Alaska rediscovering a common tongue; anger over exploitation by remote colonial powers. In this way NNS was different from any news service with which I am familiar. Much of modern journalism serves not the tribe but its chiefs: political powers, advertisers, party bosses, local industries. In doing so it speaks an atypical language of its own, remote from the everyday experience of most readers but cultivated to near perfect-pitch through steady, unvarying repetition: pronouncements from on high, unchallenged assertions of authorities, ritual descriptions of ritual events in which Their Leaders meet Our Leaders. From that fire emanates no warmth at all. The "atypical vocabulary" of the Northern News Service represents an embryonic but still-evolving attempt to trade that disembodied language of "official journalism" for something closer to the genuine experience of its readers. It is a commonplace throughout the North that something about its shared sense of frontier, hardship and fortitude attracts a peculiar people who revel in the distinctiveness of their lives, the difference between them and others in more settled, temperate climes. Wondering on one dark, minus 40-degree day why anyone would choose to live as we were in Alaska, a longtime Northerner said, "You know, if they ever need people to colonize the moon, Alaskans will probably volunteer for the dark side." Perhaps the Northern News Service will be there to help them define the experience when they do. The End