Kids wriggled on the floor and first-graders wore paper "USA" hats at Tyson Elementary School in Mountain View during a Veterans Day assembly earlier this month.
As a high-pitched chorus of "America the Beautiful" reached a crescendo, Kirsten Swann went up on her heels. She lifted her camera high in the air to snap a photo. Then she melted back against the auditorium wall.
"Taking pictures is still the hardest part of this," whispered Swann, the creator, editor and only staffer at Mountain View Post, a hyperlocal news venture that focuses solely on the Northeast Anchorage neighborhood.
Earlier this year, Swann, a 24-year-old writer with broadcast reporting experience, set out to report the news and stories of Mountain View -- big and small, positive and negative. She created mtviewpost.com and launched the site in March. Since then, she's watched the stream of traffic steadily grow, mainly through word of mouth.
Her slice-of-life stories offer a glimpse into the rhythm and interests of the neighborhood. A rap concert in a church parking lot. A feature on a gang intelligence officer with the Anchorage Police Department, back on patrol to fill staffing gaps. The lingering questions about a 54-year-old woman's disappearance. A community meeting giving voice to problems with snowplowing and sidewalk accessibility.
A sidebar on the site tracks the most popular books at Mountain View Branch Library (for a recent week, the top book was "Edge of Dawn: A Midnight Breed Novel," by Lara Adrian).
On Tuesday, Swann showed up at Tyson Elementary for the Veterans Day assembly, the school's first. Afterward, she approached Principal John Kito for an interview. He confided in her that his own brother had died while serving in Vietnam in 1967. That fact made its way into the story.
"It's been, to me, refreshing to know there is such a venue that speaks of good things happening," Kito, a school administrator in Mountain View for more than two decades, said of Swann's efforts.
After leaving the elementary school, Swann walked the roughly six blocks home on slick streets. In January, Swann and her husband Nick, the chief photographer at KTVA-TV, moved from a studio apartment in Spenard into a small one-story house in the heart of Mountain View. They liked the prospect of a yard where their pint-sized dogs could run around.
Swann grew up in Portland, Ore., and moved to Anchorage when she was 10. She was home-schooled, and she left college in Michigan after two years to pursue journalism. Her background includes stints writing about local politics at the Anchorage Daily Planet and for the Alaska Policy Forum, a conservative think tank. In 2011, she joined the staff at KTVA as a broadcast reporter. She quit about a year later and took a few odd jobs, including handling marketing for the Northway Mall.
At the start of this year, she was back working at KTVA and reading up on hyperlocal blogs in other states. She wondered why Anchorage didn't have more.
"It seems like such a media-rich place," Swann said, sitting on her couch. "So many bloggers, writers."
Swann particularly sensed a wealth of untold stories in Mountain View, a neighborhood 1.5 square miles in area and home to about 7,700 people, according to census data. In 2013, a University of Alaska Anchorage researcher found that as of 2010, Mountain View was the most diverse census tract in the United States.
But the neighborhood's richness, Swann said, has been overshadowed by a reputation for crime and violence, a stigma she said is tied to news coverage that tends to highlight only the negative.
"It's easy to go run a Google News search for Mountain View, and every single story is 'Somebody got shot' or 'Some crime happened,'" Swann said. "For the amount of people living here and what was getting reported, I felt there was a lot of stuff that wasn't being told."
The Post is not Mountain View's first local news initiative. For several years, the nonprofit Anchorage Community Land Trust ran a monthly print newsletter called the Mountain View Villager. But the project sapped staff time and resources, said Radhika Krishna, community development associate with the land trust.
"We always thought it would be perfect if a resident took up the project themselves," Krishna said.
When the land trust heard about Swann's plans, it formally folded the Villager. The organization also secured $2,400 through a grant from Wells Fargo for an eight-part Mountain View Post series called "Working in Mountain View." Swann has full editorial control and has published two stories in the series so far.
When it comes to the Mountain View Post, Swann hasn't advertised much. Her articles run in the Anchorage Press. To support herself, she also freelances for Alaska Business Monthly and fills in as a web editor at KTVA two days a week.
If she rolls up her sleeve, tattoos appear. On her right shoulder, a snarling tiger appears over the words "Up And At 'Em," a reminder of something her dad used to tell her back when she was a competitive swimmer. On her forearm, an Emily Dickinson poem is intertwined with the freestyle work of Anchorage tattoo artist Lui Talo.
Her first tattoo, which she got when she was 19, is on her left wrist. It reads, "Be thou my vision."
Right now, her vision is being a one-woman showcase of hyperlocal news. Even if she's only one woman.
"I've heard a lot of people say, 'This is awesome. I wish there was something like it in my neighborhood,'" Swann said. "But for one person to branch out ... there are only so many hours in the day."