Howard Weaver, who helped an Alaskan newspaper win three Pulitzers, dies at 73

“I produced a steady stream of stories that played on the front page,” he wrote in his 2012 memoir, “Write Hard, Die Free,” the title of which was taken from the Hells Angels motto “Ride hard, die free.” “Every day was Christmas.”

After winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1976 with reporters Bob Porterfield and Jim Babb, Mr. Weaver left the founding Daily News to start a statewide investigative weekly, The Alaska Advocate, which focused on oil and gas exploration companies and the conservative Anchorage Times, the state's largest newspaper. .

The Advocate folded within a few years, but The Daily News survived, thanks to a financial injection from the McClatchy newspaper chain, which bought the paper in 1979, and the oil boom that bolstered the city's economy. Mr. Weaver, 29, returned as editor and began a cutthroat competition with The Times, which claimed about 46,000 readers to The Daily News' 11,000.

His editorial strategy was simple: “Reader-centered, philosophically transparent, and intellectually aggressive.” By 1987, The Daily News had overtaken its rival in circulation, although both papers were losing money.

After The Times went bankrupt in 1992, Mr. Weaver took a year off to earn a Master of Philosophy degree in polar studies from the University of Cambridge. He then moved to McClatchy's California headquarters, where he led the company's transition to digital media, wrote feature articles for The Sacramento Bee and became vice president of news, overseeing the editorial staff of the company's 31 newspapers. company from 2001 to 2008, when he retired. to a ranch near Sacramento.