The Knik News Archive

The Knik News was started on October 16, 1914, by Ted Needham, under the umbrella of The Seward Gateway and its owner, Bernard Stone. Evangeline Atwood and Lew Williams, Jr., write in Bent Pins to Chains that when Needham left for several months to care for his sick wife, L. Frank Shaw from the Seward Gateway covered for him with the Knik News. Upon Needham's return, he and Shaw decided to move the paper to Ship Creek, where a new settlement was growing. Needham and Shaw circulated a petition to urge the federal government to approve the new townsite, and they released an extra on May 27, 1915, called the Cook Inlet Pioneer and Knik News. This described the plans for the new town and included an editorial advocating more wildlife conservation. The first official issue of their new title was released on June 6, and they purchased printing equipment from the Cordova Daily Alaskan several months later to allow them to print a regular daily paper. The new daily edition, called the Cook Inlet Pioneer, was released in October and published concurrently with their existing weekly edition. These were the first papers in what would become the city of Anchorage.

In May of 1916, the Cook Inlet Pioneer was sold to Charlie Herron, a wealthy Alaskan and staunch republican supporter who began championing Teddy Roosevelt and Judge Wickersham in his new paper. Herron enlarged the plant and brought on Harry Steel of the Cordova Times to edit the paper. Herron secured telegraph news service from the Associated Press in July 1916 and the paper size increased from relatively small 4-page issues to larger 8-, 10-, or even 12-page issues during this time, as it began carrying national and international news. An editorial in the February 23, 1917, issue bragged that the Anchorage Daily Times and Cook Inlet Pioneer "has the largest circulation of any paper in Alaska," although the exact number was not given.

On May 24 Herron rebranded the Cook Inlet Pioneer to the Anchorage Daily Times and Cook Inlet Pioneer. A year later Cook Inlet Pioneer was dropped from the title, creating the Anchorage Daily Times which ran until 1975. The weekly Cook Inlet Pioneer & Knik News became the Anchorage Weekly Times and Cook Inlet Pioneer in 1916, and then briefly the Anchorage Weekly Times and Alaska Labor News when Herron acquired the Alaska Labor News and dedicated between a column and a page in the new paper to labor matters and issues.

The amount of labor-related content decreased over time and had long-since ceased by August 22, 1918, when the title was shortened back to the Anchorage Weekly Times, which continued through May 1942. After a hiatus of several years during World War II, it was continued by The Forty-Ninth Star from 1946 until it ceased publication on June 24, 1951.