EP 122 Hockey, journalism and being the last editor of the Anchorage Press with O’Hara Shipe

In this episode, Cody talks to O’Hara Shipe. She’s a former professional hockey player and a journalist. She started playing hockey at 5 years old after she was told she couldn’t because she’s a girl. So, the next thing she did was go to her parents and tell them that’s what she was gonna to do. They signed her up that fall and she walked over to the coach and said she was gonna be their next goalie.

 

She’s never liked being told that she’s limited, that she can’t do something. So, when her professional hockey career came to an end in 2013, it was devastating. She contracted viral meningitis from a dirty back injection. The infection led to myalgic encephalomyelitis, or ME, and causes neurological disorders. Hand tremors, memory loss, neuropathy, excruciating pain. There are even times when her ability to speak is taken from her. When she was first diagnosed, she was bed-bound, but she worked her way up to playing hockey and rock climbing a couple times a week. She’s an eternal optimist. That’s how she defines herself in so many aspects of her life, and the last thing she was going to do was let this illness define her.

 

Before she was its editor, she took photos and wrote articles for the Anchorage Press. The second article she wrote for the paper was about the band Buckcherry. They were in Anchorage playing a show and they gave her a candid, warts-and-all interview. It was a transformative experience for her as a journalist, to see an entire picture of a celebrity, not just their public image. She says that was the turning point for her, when she really started to consider herself a writer. And the more she wrote and took photos for the paper, the better she understood the function of alt-weeklies, how they provide a unique opportunity to talk about the things that fall outside of traditional media, the human stories behind the news.

 

When she became the editor of the Anchorage Press, she wanted to return it to what she considered its heyday. For her, that was under the editorship of Susy Buchanan. O’Hara says the paper was well-designed, the stories were insightful, hard-hitting and they had a point of view. Her goal was to return it back to that, but with such a small budget to pay contributors it was hard. Instead of being able to pay contributors each week for content, she was responsible for writing four or five articles and taking most of the photos. It was definitely a labor of love. She’d go on 36-hour work benders to design, copy-edit and rewrite articles when necessary. This lasted for about nine months, and then on December 16, 2022 she was told the paper was closing and was given less than an hour to gather her things.