An Alaska newspaper publisher is ready to hand his operation to a new owner at an unbeatable price: $0.

Larry Persily, a longtime journalist who runs the Skagway News in the state’s panhandle, is willing to give away the small-town paper to a multi-talented professional who can ensure it a bright future.

Persily bought the Skagway News in April, after a friend, who founded it in 1978, talked him into it, he said. Under the previous owners, it had been struggling financially as staff came and went. Persily hoped to reverse its fortunes, but that was more difficult and costly than he had expected. Then came a turning point: the editor quit after a year.

“I reached a conclusion,” Persily, 68, said. “The owner, the editor, the reporter, the publisher, the subscription-taker has got to be the same person, who is part of the community, lives there year-round.” He figured he couldn’t sell a money-losing operation for much, and anyway, “I don’t care about the money as much as I’d like it to survive.”

The local newspaper’s financial predicament has become all too common. Facing online competition for readers and advertising dollars, publications have struggled and folded across the country. A recent study found that 20% of metro and community newspapers have gone out of business or merged since 2004, while 1,300 communities have lost local news coverage entirely. Dean Baquet, the New York Times’ executive editor, recently called the death of local news “the greatest crisis in American journalism”.

Persily hopes to pass the reins to a committed journalist willing to live in Skagway, a town of 1,000. Ideally, it would be someone who has lived in Alaska and knows the state’s quirks. “It’s weird up here,” he said. “It’s weirder than Sarah Palin is weird.” Getting to the printer requires a 125-mile drive through snow and ice over a mountain pass. Businesses close in the winter and there’s just one grocery store. Persily describes it as, if not an isolated life, then a “self-motivated” one.

The current staff is tiny: following the editor’s departure, it’s just Persily and an administrator who works three-quarter time. Persily’s ideal candidate also knows the ins and outs of working at a small-town paper. “You have to be cognizant of the fact that a lot of people get uncomfortable when you stick a microphone into their face,” he said. With a circulation of 550, don’t expect to be breaking stories of national importance; do expect to be attending lots of local events.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Larry Persily, the publisher of the Skagway News, in the newspaper office in Skagway, Alaska. Photograph: Molly McCammon/AP

And given that the new boss will be reporting on neighbors, they may sometimes need to balance others’ personal needs with hard-nosed journalism. “You’ve got to learn how to be honest and credible, but also how to be understanding and accommodating of a small town.” Persily tells the story of a man caught driving under the influence: “He called and said look, I know I got busted … I know you put the names in the paper. But my grandma’s dying, they figure about a week – can you just hold off on it until she’s dead?”

Persily agreed. “Is the Columbia Journalism Review gonna condemn me for holding three lines on a police blotter for a week? No,” he said. “You just have to be attuned to different lives and priorities and not play gotcha.”

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He calculates that the person, or couple, who takes over the paper can expect to pay themselves about $50,000. That’s enough, he says, to live reasonably comfortably in the town, which gets about a million visitors a year via cruise ship. More than half the paper’s revenue comes from a visitor’s guide, made to look like an old-fashioned newspaper.

“They’ll be able to eat and clothe themselves and have cable TV,” Persily said. “Will they be able to afford a second home in Barbados? I don’t think so.”

Even if that picturesque second home is out of reach, Skagway, part of the Klondike Gold Rush national historical park, offers beauty of its own. And the future owner will have some free assistance from Persily, who says he will remain available as editor emeritus, offering decades of experience in Alaska journalism.

Announcing his plans in the Skagway News, he wrote: “I wanted you to hear it from me. That’s the job of a small-town newspaper. Everyone’s already heard some version of the news by the time we publish, but our job is to tell them the full and factual story.”