The intention of our feature Alaskans in the World
People around the world imagine Alaska as the dream place of freedom and Eskimos.
What is missing from our lives here? What are we searching for, and what are we finding?
The goal of Unheard Voices
The purpose of this newspaper is to seek out the inner and under-represented voices of all of us. The goal of Unheard Voices is to share the voices of people who are marginalized in more tangible ways: the afflicted, the poor, the disabled, prisoners, prostitutes, the addicted, the elderly or the young, etc. What does it mean to live in a violent world that suppresses what is of most importance? How does it feel to be oppressed, violated, or ignored? What led the subjects to where they have arrived? What do they cherish, and how do they hope to achieve this?
Please contact us with your ideas about other unheard voices.
Where is ‘elemental society’?
It is a place where the true things we sense, and that lie deepest in our heart, have a place to be expressed and to be heard. It is a safe place for the sensitive, exquisite inner life, and our hidden, underdeveloped, beautiful voices. It contains the capacity to bring the beautiful into society—to bring deep public life into existence through its roots.
It is the way the organization of society cultivates the appreciation of beauty, intellect, and emotional depth; the way it promotes genuine relationships; the way it creates opportunities for meaningful participation.
Restaurant reviews
Our total review standards
How does the restaurant nurture our whole selves (not just our bodies)? Rated with four to zero suns (or sunny-side eggs on a plate).
The norm
Food, taste, price, service, cleanliness, atmosphere.
Spirit
Authenticity, generosity, truthfulness, compassion, simplicity, inclusiveness, awareness, beauty.
Justice
Labor of producers, environment, wages of workers, profit structure, hierarchy or equality.
Community
Community relations, art, healthy food, quiet spaces
Judged by zero to three suns on a plate.
Rates cards
Our rates are good and the exposure of advertisements is good too! With over 10,000 copies printed, and distribution at more than 200 locations—and a full month of exposure on the news stands—advertising in Alaska Humanity News is an effective way to get your point across.
Bob Lord is our Advertising Representative. Call 563-5634 for details.
General rate: $10.50 ci
2 columns x 2 inches: $42.00
Eighth page: $125.00
Sixth page: $175
Quarter page: $225
Half page: $425
Full page: $800
columns
One column: 1.5”
Two columns: 3.125”
Three columns: 4.75”
Four columns: 6.5”
Five columns: 8.125”
Six columns: 9.75”
Frequency discount: 5% for two issues; 10% for more than two.
Advertising agency discount: 15%
Non-profit discount: 15%
Make suggestions or help with distribution
Alaska Humanity News is distributed at about 200 regular locations. We would like to expand the scope of distribution. If you’d like to help with this, let us know. And if you have suggestions about additional places the places could be, let us know about that too.
Anchorage Citizens' Coalition
...
Experiences and discoveries of traveling Alaskans.
May include interviews.
Organizations we support
Alaska Humanity News supports these organizations because they are working towards a more just, more livable, and more vital world.
This is a space that belongs to those organizations, and which they can use for events listings, and any content they choose.
A place of equal exchange.
Trade your things or skills for other people’s things or skills.
Educational events and opportunities to restore aliveness in life and learning.
Educational events and opportunities around town. Especially those which might be inspiring or transformative, and which do have a hierarchical, authoritative structure.
Submit your experiences
Brief stories about quirky, funny, or other meaningful urban happenings. Incidences of unexpected care, consciousness, or love.
Please submit descriptions of situations you have experienced. These selections should be no more than one paragraph.
Submit Letters to the editor here
Send an email to letters@qupq.com, or if you prefer press the Register button, above, to login and submit your Letter to the editor.
Please submit entries of 200 words or less. Alaska Humanity may edit the submission for grammar or clarity. We cannot guarantee publication of all submission.
Articles, features, and other contributions
We are seeking submissions of information and other content to the following newspaper features:
The Invisible College (educational events)
Barter Board
Celebrations (meetings)
Classifieds
We are seeking newspaper participants, members or staff to take responsibility for the following features:
Metropolitan Diary
Restaurant ‘reviews’
Movie ‘reviews’
Alaskans in the world
We are seeking assistance with the Community News and Alternatives pages:
See other ‘Opportunities’ entry.
You can make submissions in the ‘Categories’ section, at the left of this web page. Our office also has resources to explore and means to contribute. If you are interested in producing a particular feature (or have ideas about a new one), please contact us or attend a future meeting.
Our new office
We have just moved into our new office in the Ship Creek Center on Fourth Avenue, a group of Native and Alaskan crafts store—a unique Alaskan mall.
At the moment we do not have scheduled office hours. But we are often there in the afternoons.
Our address: 333 W 4th Avenue, Suite 208.
Just look for the new totem pole.
Please contact us at (907) 563-5634.
What is news?
What is meaningful news?
Our genuine voices are not recognized by society. The principal social institutions address our superficial aspects: self-preservation, economic wealth, and the satisfaction of desire. These are the features of biological life, and they are important for survival and pleasure, but they do not begin to comprehend the full range of our nature.
What appears to be news – what attracts our attention and galvanizes (or saps) our energy – is not new and not even of particular importance. The air we breathe is so omnipresent and so natural to our present existence that we can’t imagine an alterative. We assume that there is nothing we can do about the issues that are most fundamental and affect us most deeply.
How do we find the primary news stories? We need to step back: to follow the road from our origin until we reach the philosophical and spiritual starting place. It is here that we may see what is actually important; and every step forward then becomes a way of contributing to a vision of what is best and most beautiful. The real questions are how one actually comes up with one’s point of view, what interests it defends, and whether it enlarges or diminishes life.
Our goal is to identify the key contemporary situations that are ignored or poorly represented in the existing press. We need to find the stories that are so real and so important that we are entirely resigned to them or do not see that they exist. What if there were a headline that read ‘Politician rewards financial backers’ or ‘Corporation preys on fears’ or ‘City is ugly and sterile’?
What is superficial? Whatever is purely material, economic, external. What is deep? Whatever provides access to truth, beauty, love, good, and the sacred. Let us look for the response that is healing and transformative, that stimulates life, that nourishes interiority and active co-creation of the institutions that structure our everyday lives.
What kind of newspaper is this?
From the first issue of Alaska Humanity News (April, 2005)
What is the paper you now have in your hands?
We aspire to something intangible, something that does not exist but should exist. We are striving for new forms, new features. If you can tell too easily what this newspaper is about we are not doing our job.
Who is to say what is news? A newspaper validates and fixes reality. The headlines themselves are news makers. Conventional papers are interesting, but they report the news of our blandness, our petty struggles, our sour certainties. They report our inability to grasp subtle explanations or higher truths. And they reveal the level of our happiness, the depth of our souls.
Who is to say what is objective, what is real, what is sensible? The press presses the status quo onto our personalities. Society imposes itself on us, and suppresses our hearts and souls.
What if the actual news were right before our eyes, but we didn’t see it? And what if we woke up one day and realized that all along we had been seeing false images and thinking with incoherent thoughts?
We want to go through, and under, and beyond the static news. We want to find the dynamic, challenging, inspiring news that we don’t have words yet to explain: inner news, news of the shattered and the broken, news of the beautiful and the good.
It’s not about the power of the rich. It’s not about the oppression of the powerless. It’s not about the erosion of democracy, or the loss of community, or the profaning of our culture. All these are true. But they are only byproducts and symptoms of the real news.
The news is us. It is in us and flows out of us. This world is an accurate expression of our current identity. It is not the invention of the rich or the famous, the politicians or the executives. We accept our status as peons and pawns but we don’t have to.
The real news is powerful, transformative. We just need to say it, in the public arena. Just by reporting it, it will happen.
Internet sites are too transitory. We want to dip our hands in the ink. We want to participate in the old world, of physical objects that actually exist, that we see in businesses and common spaces and that we can pick up and peruse.
Our paper, our ink, our life: this is a model for communication and participation and creation of the world that is in us but as yet has no way out. And here is also an invitation to you: Join us, as co-creators, or idea gatherers, or as part of the community of readers who are making the news by reframing the questions.
The process of responding to events
How do we respond to the situations we find ourselves in? There is a total response, which takes account of what actually is, what the possibilities are, and how to judge meaning.
Understanding the situation
Global and personal paradigms
Fundamental questions
Fundamental choices
Alternatives
Challenges
Click here to go to our Huzanity Center website, with links to classes, and an exploration of the meaning and means of understanding.
Contact information
e-mail: news@huzanity.org
phone: 907-563-5634
address:
Alaska Humanity News
333 West 4th Avenue Avenue Suite 208
Anchorage Alaska 99501
How do we understand society?
This is an open forum to contribute insights about what is going on in our community
What strikes you and egages your attention? What promotes life in our community, and what favors sterility, control, and mediocrity What serves bureaucracy, distant forces, ugly motives? And what reflects creativity, life, inspiration, challenge, transformation, and beauty?
Alaska Humanity News Mission Statement
Goals
Sustainable economically and in its production.
The paper will be subsidized for only nine months or so. To maintain the professionalism, reliability, and breadth of circulation, we cannot depend solely on volunteers: we will need to (and want to, as a way of involving the wider community) have fairly elaborate advertising, which means that we must produce a paper that could attract these advertisers.
A message of depth, transformation, and beauty.
We want to take a fresh look at Alaskan news: to examine contemporary situations and find their meaning and spiritual core. In order to do this, we must have a living sense of truth, beauty, love, good, and the sacred.
What does this really mean? Does it make sense? Can we do this?
A voice for the voiceless – Those whose real identity is not nourished, reflected, or expressed.
Partly this means that we want to remember those who have little power in society: the poor, the disabled, the young, the elderly, and the natural world. Mainly our focus is on being a voice for the deeper dimensions of everyday life. The mainstream media tells us and defines what’s real. What is missing, and what is essential?
Courage to challenge the status quo from a positive perspective.
A model to create similar papers in other cities.
What we are not
Politically partisan: Liberal, progressive, conservative, or reactionary (But interested in the effect of politics on human beings).
We do want to examine the political situation and political events. But let’s try to understand the way conflicts arise, and could be resolved, by finding their human and spiritual sources.
Primarily entertainment or health oriented (But interested in the celebration and defense of life.)
Not religiously partisan, ideological or dogmatic (But capable of seeing what is sacred or ultimate).
Vulgar or sexually explicit
Contentious (but capable of positive, direct challenge)
An opportunity for self-expression, or to expose injustice.
What is valuable about ourselves? What is the cause of injustice, and what is a healing response? This is what we want to publicize.
Manager and Layout/ Designer
We expect that these part-time positions will require a total of about 40 flexible hours per month (25 for Manager and 15 for Designer). The two jobs could be filled by the same person.
Duties of the Manager position include: assigning projects, making sure that our news articles and feature stories are written, organizing volunteers, editing, and coordination of advertising and distribution.
The qualifying applicant will have the ability to work well with a growing staff. We will consider an applicant who does not yet have all suggested skills. The job will involve close coordination with the editor and the volunteer staff.
Pay depending on the situation. We were planning on paying about $500 - $1,000 to a person or people who can fulfill the responsibilities.