Q&A: Mollie Kabler on how collaboration helps Alaska public media thrive
Mollie Kabler is the executive director of CoastAlaska, a public media collaborative of six radio stations across Alaska’s southwest coast — Sitka, Juneau, Ketchikan, Wrangell, Petersburg, and Unalaska.
For nearly 30 years, Kabler has helped Alaska’s public radio stations work together and serve their local communities in the face of massive budget cuts and existential difficulties. We caught up with Kabler to hear about why collaboration is so vital for journalism in Alaska.
WF: How did you get started in collaborative journalism and public media in Alaska?
MK: When I got to Sitka, in the early 80s, they were starting a public radio station. I thought, well, I’m a community member, I have nothing to lose. So I went down and learned how to operate the board and do a volunteer music show. My first paid position at KCAW started in 1985.
In the early 90s, I was part of a conversation when there was a funding threat to our small stations in the region about how can we work together and have more self-determination — rather than those who are threatening to cut our funding make those decisions for us. That was the beginning of CoastAlaska. The first time we met, we didn’t agree on anything except to meet again, pretty much.
WF: How did CoastAlaska come together in the following years?
MK: We grew into a paperless operation, developed and honed fundraising skills, developed our collaboration skills, and did our best to retain focus on improving local service to our communities even as we were centralizing services as CoastAlaska regional.
We’re not a top-down organization. Each station manager in our collective has the ability to do their own budgeting, hire and fire their staff, manage their content, and make their on-the-ground decisions about what they’re broadcasting. But we pay for centralized services collectively: the business office, the executive director, engineering, IT, the regional news director, and some fundraising personnel.
WF: I know there have been some more recent threats of funding cuts to Alaska public media. How has that affected CoastAlaska?
MK: In 2019, the governor vetoed all of the funding in the budget for public media: $2.7 million that had been going to the 26 or 27 stations in Alaska. Our collaborative had saved reserves and worked together, so we were thankful to be able to support each other through those big cuts.
And then the pandemic happened, and that changed everything again. But we’ve lived through that and our communities have valued our local news and services so much that they’ve helped sustain us through this time period.
WF: How did the collaborative help throughout these challenging times?
MK: We really had one another to look to for how we responded to the pandemic — we shared programming, products, and experts talking about Covid-related issues. We also learned from each other about resources that were available.
For example, the stations wrote grants for support to make sure their reporters could work safely. We had a series of grants to help reporters and news directors work from home and report and produce their news without going to the stations. The grants came from The Center for Excellence in Journalism, CARES funding from the Alaska Community Foundation, and several community based CARES Act opportunities.
We funded equipment and office supplies to provide effective ergonomic work spaces at home for all employees. PPE equipment for safer in-office work was purchased as well as some other equipment replacement to assure a robust broadcast capability.
WF: What makes collaboration successful for CoastAlaska?
MK: When there’s a problem, or when there’s an issue that’s sticky, you have to bring it up and put it on the table — and as a group, work to resolve it. That doesn’t mean you have to get to a consensus on everything, but you have to learn that if something isn’t working for part of your organization, you have to bring it up. Otherwise it just builds on itself.
Also, everybody doesn’t have to do things in the same way. You need a certain amount of looseness within a collaborative so that if someone is ready to grow in a certain direction, hopefully the collaborative can let them do that work, and the other people in the collaborative can learn from them.
The model of public radio in Alaska has been very local. We have a small population, but we have a lot of geography. So the stations tend to be very focused on the local community, and in some cases, there’s a cultural and language specificity that each station brings to its community, that makes it different from other stations.
A lot of people have heard my analogy — there’s five jelly beans on the table and a rubber band around them. For us, the rubber band is CoastAlaska and the jelly beans are our stations. We need our stations to stay in the rubber band because that represents doing things together, but we need to stay loose inside the rubber band, so everyone can do things their own way.
If you’re ready to grow, you’re going to head off in a direction and push against the rubber band, and it’s gonna move. Eventually, it’s gonna pull those other jelly beans along because they’re gonna learn from you, your leadership, and the direction you’re growing. But you can’t break the rubber band because that’s the cohesion that keeps you together.
WF: As you look into the future, what are you working on to improve CoastAlaska?
MK: We’re primarily a white organization. We don’t reflect the demographics of our region. That has to change. We’re starting to expand more of our contract services with CoastAlaska outside of the region. Western and NW Alaska have strong Indigenous populations, so we will need to grow in our work with them and our support with them.
Local news and community engagement are some of our primary values as an organization. The way we would do it is to be able to support what’s happening locally. So we’re really working on reaching those populations within our communities who we haven’t been reaching — a lot through language — we have a lot of Indigenous languages in Alaska.
It’s the idea of nothing about us without us. If you’re interested in telling a story or focusing on a community, you have to build that community connection and do it together.
WF: Overall, what are the lessons you’ve learned doing this collaborative work?
MK: Every time there’s a challenge, there’s also an opportunity. If you can find the opportunity, that’s how you can grow collaboratives. It’s always true that when you share ideas, you learn things. It’s not about control of resources, or command of anything. We can work together for what our common goals are.
Will Fischer is a journalist covering the intersection of technology and media. He’s worked for Business Insider and New York magazine, and conducted local news research for City Bureau. Follow Will on Twitter @willfisch15 or email him at willfisch15@gmail.com.
About the Center for Cooperative Media: The Center is a grant-funded program of the School of Communication and Media at Montclair State University. Its mission is to grow and strengthen local journalism, and in doing so serve New Jersey residents. The Center is supported with funding from Montclair State University, the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, Democracy Fund, the New Jersey Local News Lab (a partnership of the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, Democracy Fund, and Community Foundation of New Jersey), and the Abrams Foundation. For more information, visit CenterforCooperativeMedia.org.
