s a brand, Alaska Business has permanently adopted a cautiously optimistic outlook. For those who don’t recall, the phrase “cautiously optimistic” was more or less required in every economic forecast and keynote speech in the state during the few years of slow growth between oil prices crashing in 2014 and the rise of the pandemic in 2020. Even with those particular obstacles behind us, within these pages the phrase retains its utility.

There are some projects that—considering the long, long, long, long road they’ve traveled—we approach with a healthy dollop of caution. Without naming names, an LNG pipeline or the Alaska-to-Canada rail line may or may not fall in that category (although we love every update we can find on them). Others, such as a study on the feasibility of extracting rare earth elements from seaweed, are so early and speculative there’s little to propel them forward except optimism, and we’re happy to share it.

But within our editorial suite, before the final pages are sent to print, optimism always takes a back seat to caution. Key phrases—the biggest, the only, the longest, the worst, the best, the last—trigger our editorial cynicism, and we go looking for the facts.

We then have a conversation about what we find, if what we’ve found is pertinent to the conversation, and if the information meets this magazine’s goals.

For example: the March oil and gas lease sale in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska (NPRA). Shortly after the lease sale results were released, headlines littered the media landscape stating that this lease sale generated the most revenue of any NPRA sale. When the draft for our article landed on my desk, I was discussing edits with my editor Scott Rhode, and I mentioned out loud the record revenue of nearly $164 million; he immediately said, “Kind of; not really.” So we talked.

In the 1999 NPRA lease sale, six companies submitted 174 bids on 133 tracts, with 867,721 total acres receiving bids. The high bids totaled $104,635,728. Adjusted for inflation, that’s approximately $207 million today. Those facts, and the conversation about them, resulted in the unobtrusive edit “in nominal dollars” that we felt increased the accuracy of the introduction without detracting from the general excitement over the lease sale. Just that simple note was enough for us to signal that—although the lease sales results were exciting (and we share that excitement!), and although our publication champions responsible development—nevertheless, we double-check the optimism.