Sad News to Report
The Alaska Center for Excellence in Journalism fund advisory committee is saddened to report the loss of one of its founding members, Elizabeth Arnold.
Elizabeth Arnold
Arnold, who chaired the grants selection committee and spearheaded the creation of the Legislative Reporter Exchange, was 66 when she died last week after battling cancer. She supported Alaska journalists and students even through her last months, during which she led the ACEJ grants committee through selections for spring reporting projects and public media newsrooms.
Arnold started her reporting career in Bethel, Alaska in the 1980s at the Tundra Drums newspaper. In 1985 she made the shift to public radio, working for KTOO in Juneau, and became an NPR correspondent after guiding national reporters through coverage of the Exxon Valdez oil spill. She covered Congress and presidential campaigns for NPR and was an environmental reporter. Don’t picture a typical Capitol reporter though —former colleagues note that she rode a Harley Davidson through the streets of Washington, D.C., and that she had also worked on a gillnetter salmon fishing. Her reporting has been awarded numerous times over the years, and earlier this year, Arnold was elected to the National Academy of Arts and Sciences.
[Read her obituary in the Juneau Independent]
In 2009, she returned to Alaska and joined the Journalism department at the University of Alaska Anchorage. She taught and mentored numerous journalists who are reporting both in and outside of Alaska today.
Arnold’s commitment to Alaska journalism went far beyond the classroom. In 2020 she became a founding member of the Alaska Center for Excellence in Journalism, a fund at the Alaska Community Foundation, which focuses on funding in-depth coverage of complex, underreported issues. She chaired the fund’s grants selection committee through times that included rapid-response to COVID-19 work-from-home needs, in-depth projects covering the state’s Constitutional Convention ballot measure, the 50th anniversary of ANCSA, and coverage of the move of coastal Alaska communities. Most recently, the committee awarded $30,000 between two public radio newsrooms in Alaska after Congress defunded the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
She was also a founder and integral guide for ACEJ’s Legislative Reporter Exchange program, which sends a small newsroom reporter to Juneau during the Legislative session and a paid university student to cover for the reporter while they are away. “Elizabeth's persistence every year in promoting and encouraging students to spend a month in a rural newsroom made it possible for the small newspapers or radio stations to send their reporter to Juneau,” wrote Larry Persily, former ACEJ Advisory Committee chair and Capitol mentor in the program.
She is also a founding member of the Alaska News Coalition, which serves small Alaska newsrooms by providing financial, technical, and policy assistance. In her role at UAA she worked with journalism support organizations to offer journalism courses that would better prepare students and working journalists for reporting in the state, and she worked to establish an Operational Endorsement Certificate in Community Reporting, which should be offered to students this fall.
“She was unwavering in her support of journalism and especially young journalists,” ACEJ chair Lori Townsend said of Arnold on Alaska Public Media’s “Alaska News Nightly” last week. “She was an amazing colleague, mentor and stellar reporter, who didn't mince words and she leaves an important legacy of a life dedicated to truth telling, holding elected officials to account and helping Alaskans and all Americans understand the complex issues of our time.”