by Michael Armstrong

Interim editor, Homer Independent Press

Decades ago, when my wife and I added on to our 320-square-foot dry cabin on Diamond Ridge, we had to jack up the building to put in a full foundation and an addition. Jeff Middleton raised our home and rested it temporarily on cribs while on her backhoe Tarri Thurman carved out footings with surgical precision.

I made a sign I stapled to the side of the old cabin with a quote from Henry David Thoreau’s “Walden”: “If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.”

I think back to that cabin hanging in the air, so rickety we couldn’t sleep in it, as I now help build a new castle in the air, the Homer Independent Press, Homer’s first locally owned, independent newspaper since Jim Hornaday started the Homer Tribune back in 1991. As Col. Norman Vaughan would say, we’re dreaming big and daring to fail — a quote on the notebook I used for people to sign in at my retirement party in December 2022.

The need for a locally owned, locally produced newspaper has been growing over the years as corporate-owned Homer media cut staff, sold real estate and reduced local content — sucking the life out of a once vibrant paper and creating what critics of corporate media call a “zombie” press. When four experienced journalists on the Kenai Peninsula resigned in protest on the principle that local reporters should have local control of the papers they write for and edit, that need became stronger.

A group of us that has grown to about 30 got the notion to start a new newspaper after that little kerfuffle in late September and those journalists resigned and Alaska lost about four decades worth of experienced writers.

The core group of NZP4H, or “No Zombie Press For Homer,” the local nonprofit corporation that formed to start this enterprise, talked about those events at their weekly coffee meeting and about how Homer needed a paper free of interference from an Outside media corporation based in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Quicker than you could say, “Too bad about that retirement, dude, “ they suckered me into being interim editor.

And here I am.

I don’t know what the Homer Independent Press will become, but our plan is this: Create an online newspaper. Find good writers to contribute and pay them. (Some of us believe in this so much we’re volunteering our time.) Find donors. Raise money. Hold a bake sale. On Jan. 1, 2026, 62 years after Hal and Marion Thorn printed the first edition of the Homer News, we hit send and made the Homer Independent Press go live.

Starting a paper from scratch when you worked at a paper for 23 years presents a stellar opportunity. Yes, we’ll have those features you expect in a community newspaper (obituaries, sports and the police blotter, “the Holy Trinity,” as Judy Muller calls them in “Emus Loose In Egnar”). We might have things the Thorns didn’t imagine when they cranked out the first 8.5-by-14 inch mimeographed missive — videos, podcasts, geotagged maps and slick hyperlinks you can follow for further reading.

Resurrecting a locally owned paper gives readers direct access to the people who make this thing happen. We’re your neighbors. Some of us have lived here 30 years or more. Don’t like what we write? You don’t have to go behind our backs and complain to some corporate suit who probably has never visited Homer. Buttonhole us at the grocery store or write a letter to the editor.

More positively, we hope you’ll help us cover this town better. Is there someone quietly improving the lives of our community? Tell us and we’ll write about them. Curious about some odd beat ordinance that doesn’t make sense? We’ll dig into it.

Starting from scratch allows us to rethink how news gets covered in a small town. What stories don’t get told? What stories have been missed? How can we tell stories differently? How can we use new technology to break through that wall where most people get their news from social media? Importantly, how can we bring together a community divided by years of political strife?

Fellow citizens dancing on the wheel of time here at the Cosmic Hamlet by the Sea (as Brother Asaiah would say), we hope you join us.

Michael Armstrong worked for 23 years at the Homer News as an editorial assistant and reporter, retiring in 2022 as editor. He has written and published five novels and numerous short stories. Reach him at michael@homerindependentpress.com.