This Convicted Felon Gets $1 Million a Year to Sell Obsolete Internet Service. You Pay for It.
Roger Shoffstall, a convicted felon, receives over $1 million annually from federal subsidies for his telecom company, Summit Telephone, despite operating from prison. Alaska has received billions in telecom subsidies but still ranks last in internet speed and access. Many Alaskans are paying high prices for slow internet services while newer satellite options offer better speeds at lower costs.
- ▪The federal government pays Shoffstall's company more than $1 million a year through a subsidy program.
- ▪Alaska has received $4.6 billion in telecom subsidies since 2016, yet ranks near the bottom for internet access.
- ▪Customers in Alaska often pay hundreds of dollars a month for slow internet services, while satellite options provide faster speeds at lower prices.
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Record
| Original publisher | ProPublica |
| Canonical URL | https://www.propublica.org/article/alaska-telecom-subsidies-roger-shoffstall |
| Publication time | Tue, 19 May 2026 10:00:00 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-19T10:09:57.447Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-19T10:09:57.447Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | v6LsfyD09nN8 |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Illustration by Shoshana Gordon/ProPublica This Convicted Felon Gets $1 Million a Year to Sell Obsolete Internet Service. You Pay for It. by Kyle Hopkins, Anchorage Daily News Co-published with Anchorage Daily News May 19, 2026, 6:00 am {"componentName":"ShareToolsRebrand","props":{"pageTitle":"","pageUrl":"https://www.propublica.org/article/alaska-telecom-subsidies-roger-shoffstall"},"contextArray":[]} {"componentName":"DarkModeToggleRebrand","props":{},"contextArray":[]} Contrast Change Appearance AutoLightDark This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with the Anchorage Daily News. Sign up for Dispatches to get our stories in your inbox every week.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at ProPublica.
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