Craig Medred on erin and hig

If the Anchorage Daily News gave a writer like Mike Dunham as much space to write about the local arts scene as they give to Craig Medred to write about the outdoors, Anchorage might be the Arts Mecca of the North, instead of the decently maturing little arts community it is. Over the past decades, Medred has written thousands of articles on various aspects of this wonderful land. His opinions are often criticized from one viewpoint or another, and he fits the title of a writer one loves to hate better than any other real writer at the ADN. PA exempts such people as Dan Fagan from the category of real writer.

Today's ADN has an extended article by Medred on erin and hig's journey from Seattle to Unimak Island. As I wrote to Craig earlier this morning, "[his] article about these two is the first so far in a major regional news outlet that grasps the enormity of what these kids are doing in a context of knowledge of the territory through which they are passing, and puts it into a bit of historical perspective."

What is also interesting about Medred's article, is that the web version contains more hyperlinks than your average ADN feature article on the web. I'm not sure how the paper deals with the process of getting their authors' web versions of articles into the 21st century, but there's a dearth of such helpful insertions in such material at the ADN. I suppose one viewpoint among journalists might be "you don't see footnotes at the bottom of our print articles, so why burden the web versions with hyperlinks."

I never thought I'd write about Craig Medred's articles two times in one week here, but I was glad to see both this essay and his earlier one about the continuing decline of Upper Cook Inlet salmon stocks. I hope the ADN now starts tracking these audacious trekkers.

Good work, Craig!

By the way: articles in the ADN so far on erin and hig - one; articles in PA about them so far - nine, not counting this one.