newsminer.com

I’m a couple weeks late in writing this, but many readers have probably noticed by now that there’s a new name atop Daily News-Miner stories coming out of Washington, D.C. Truth be told, it’s not really a new name. Betty Mills, of the Griffin-Larrabee News Bureau, has returned to reporting on Alaska issues for the News-Miner following the departure late last year of longtime News-Miner reporter and correspondent R.A. Dillon, who took a job working for Sen. Lisa Murkowski. Betty is no stranger to reporting on Alaska. Here’s a little bit of info about her, in her own words: “I was hired as a reporter at Griffin-Larrabee in 1975 and was assigned the Alaska beat. At the time our Alaska clients were the Anchorage Times and the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner. Over the years the bureau added the Juneau Empire, the Ketchikan Daily News, the Sitka Sentinel and two weeklies — the Wrangell Sentinel and the Petersburg Pilot. The bureau lost the Anchorage Times and the Fairbanks News-Miner in 1982 when the two papers joined together to send David Ramseur to Washington to cover Washington news for them. We then picked up the Anchorage Daily News for about two years until McClatchy bought the paper and hired their own Washington correspondent. I continued to report for Alaska papers until 2000…” Betty has owned Griffin-Larrabee, a small regional bureau founded in the 1940s, since 1978. We’re happy to have her writing for us, especially with Alaska having a higher national profile these days.