The sprawling Campbell Lake mansion where the former owner of the Anchorage Daily News once hosted President Barack Obama has been sold.
The sale price and the buyer are unknown, but the listing was for $3.2 million when Alice Rogoff put it on the market in October, 2020.
Rogoff lost the Anchorage Daily News in a bankruptcy settlement in 2017. She and her husband, David Rubenstein (whose home on Nantucket Island is being rented by President Joe and First Lady Jill Biden this weekend) divorced last December.
Rogoff relocated mostly full time to Alaska after buying the Anchorage Daily News from McClatchy in 2014 for $34 million. She already had controlling interest in the upstart online-only Alaska Dispatch and folded the two organizations together, renaming the entire publication the Alaska Dispatch. Her move to Alaska prompted friendly questions from the fawning Washington Post in a story titled “What’s this Washington insider and billionaire’s wife doing in Alaska?”
“Her rising profile in Alaska, her marriage to one of the country’s most successful private-equity managers, and the physical and metaphorical distance from her life — and husband — in Washington have made observers in both places curious about her ambitions,” the Post reported.
Her ambitions soon became clear as she helped engineer a win for Bill Walker in 2014, when he challenged former Gov. Sean Parnell and won — with the help of the media that she owned.
The Binkley Company, owned by the John Binkley family in Fairbanks, bought the paper for $1 million and saved it from extinction.
Rogoff’s home on the lake has 7,170 square feet, five bedrooms, seven bathrooms, and a dock for her floatplane, which she wrecked on July 3, 2016 in Halibut Cove. She was able to swim away from the downed Cessna.
Rogoff also has property on the East Coast and she publishes Arctic Today, an online news outlet with a global look at exclusively Arctic matters that she was allowed to take with her when the bankruptcy was settled.
