Sad news for our recently gerrymandered, kooky, subversive, opinionated, libertarianish, liberal community here in the environs of Squarebanks: the Ester Republic will cease publication after its Vol. 14, No. 5, Issue 150. (Has it been published? Can't find out this a.m.)
Long before there was an established Alaska blogosphere (still detest that word), when the online opinionating boom was as yet an unconnected variety of rants at any number of local watering holes with no Set O' Tubes to link them all together in cacophony... there was the print version of the Republic. Featuring local op-eds, how-to's, satire, news, some truly awesome cover photography for a small, Alaskan publication, and the marvelous cartoons of Jamie Smith. It typified the do-it-yourself, oddball, lefty sense of Ester, Goldstream, and those of similar tastes unfortunate enough to live elsewhere. It began publication in 1999, a time at which none of us yet knew that Sarah Palin existed.
Named as a nod to an epithet from a thwarted local politician, who referred to the community of Ester as the "People's Independent Republic of Ester", the paper won awards, featured news the Minus missed or wouldn't touch, and just raised hell as a paper should.
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