Update: Gen Z Blocks Red Wave in 2022 Midterms

Alaska voters returned incumbent Mike Dunleavy to the governor’s office, Mary Peltola to her U.S. House seat, and Lisa Murkowski to her seat in the U.S. Senate on Nov. 23, when ranked choice vote tabulation factored in second and third choice votes on top of the first choice counted on Election Day. A constitutional convention proposed in Ballot Measure 1 failed. The results show an … Continue reading Update: Gen Z Blocks Red Wave in 2022 Midterms

An Update: Loan Forgiveness

President Joe Biden’s plan to forgive student loans is an important development for many UAS students, and it’s “a step forward” for those not directly affected. There’s also hope for more debt forgiveness programs in the future. The UAS Financial Aid Office pointed students toward studentaid.gov as they wait to receive more information on loan forgiveness. The U.S Department of Education warns borrowers to be … Continue reading An Update: Loan Forgiveness

What About It?: Loan Forgiveness

President Joe Biden’s three-part “Student Loan Forgiveness Plan,” announced in August, could provide thousands of dollars in federal loan debt relief for low and middle-income students across the U.S. The White House on Sept. 20 estimated that 60, 500 Alaskan students would qualify, including  37,300 Alaska Pell Grant borrowers.   The cost of a college education has steadily risen over the years. Where federal aid once … Continue reading What About It?: Loan Forgiveness

What do you mean Facebook is down?

What does this recent outage show us about news access?By Mike Flunker, Editor-in-Chief Recent Whalesong editorials have emphasized a balanced media diet, critical thinking, and news engagement. It is time to look at access to news. We live in a time when media saturates our everyday lives, beamed straightto our phones, computers, radios, and televisions. We may take that for granted. What happens when part … Continue reading What do you mean Facebook is down?

The Facebook Files

By Mike Flunker, Editor-in-Chief When Facebook and its services went down for a day in October the world was left reeling. The cause of the outage was later deemed to be an update that took Facebook servers offline, a problem that was initially unsolvable because the ability to fix it was also offline. Facebook’s company-wide practice to keep everything internal caused its worst outage yet.   … Continue reading The Facebook Files