After many years at KTUU-Channel 2, Rhonda McBride is moving across town to KTVA-Channel 11. Currently she’s employed by GCI, which is in the process of buying KTVA. Until the sale goes through, Rhonda will be working with her old boss at KTUU, former news director John Tracy, who has been hired by GCI as a consultant to take KTVA’s newsroom to the next level. Rhonda’s focus at KTVA will be on rural Alaska, one of her passions. From dental health to education to politics, Rhonda has won several national awards for her coverage of rural issues.

She gained her experience reporting in the Bush at KYUK, a public radio and television station in Bethel, which broadcasts in both Yup’ik and English. Rhonda has also been a producer at the Alaska Public Radio Network — and hosted political debates and public affairs programs at KAKM-TV, Channel 7. In 2008, Rhonda took a break from broadcasting and worked for Governor Sarah Palin as her Rural Advisor.

Rhonda McBride

Elise Sereni Patkotak was born many, many years ago into a much kinder and gentler world. Her initial view of life was bounded by the Italian immigrant neighborhood in Atlantic City, New Jersey, in which she was raised and the nuns who taught her throughout her early years. She is now a recovering Catholic.

Elise lived in Barrow for 28 years, during which time she aged with astounding rapidity. While living in Barrow, she was a nurse, health director, social worker, columnist, radio show host, public information officer, city recreation director and Guardian Ad Litem (GAL), working with troubled kids in the Barrow Court System. She now lives in Anchorage with five parrots, a cockatoo and a very nervous little dog that thinks all the birds are out to get his stuff.

Elise has a small writing/graphics company, Precious Cargo, Ltd., that she hopes will actually turn a profit before she dies. She is a columnist with the Anchorage Daily News and is the author of Parallel Logic, the story of her years in Barrow.

Elise continues to work as a GAL with the Barrow Court System and also volunteers with a wild bird rehab center in Anchorage. She is a foster parent for the companion bird rescue organization, Parrot Education and Adoption Center (PEAC). She is a member of Alaska Professional Communicators and has been both its president and membership chair. She is also a past co-chair of the Alaska Public Broadcasting Commission.

Elise belongs to a wide variety of animal welfare organizations and truly believes that the world will be judged by how it treats its most helpless inhabitants, including its elderly, its young and its animals.

She spent her youth wantonly wasting her money on travel to exotic locations with her sister Judy before those places decided to start killing travelers for sport. She has visited every continent in the world except Antarctica. After living in Alaska she felt that was redundant.

Her primary goal in life now is to live long enough to spend all she has saved for her old age. Thanks to recent economic trends, this may turn out to be much easier than she initially believed possible.

Elise Patkotak

Steve Lindbeck came to public broadcasting in July 2007 after a 30-year career in journalism and public affairs. He is President and General Manager of Alaska Public Telecommunications, Inc. (APTI), which includes KAKM-TV, KSKA-FM and the Alaska Public Radio Network.

He also has served as Vice Chancellor for Advancement at the University of Alaska Anchorage, Associate Editor of the Anchorage Daily News, and Executive Director of the Alaska Humanities Forum. His journalism career included editorial positions at the Anchorage Daily News, the Anchorage Times, the Everett (Wash.) Herald, and the Boston Globe.

He has volunteered on many boards and committees, including the Anchorage Museum Association, the Alaska World Affairs Council, Big Brothers/Big Sisters of Anchorage, United Way of Anchorage, Anchorage Cultural Council, Alaska State Council on the Arts review panels, Downtown Anchorage Rotary, and Commonwealth North.

Lindbeck, an Anchorage resident since 1968, is a graduate of West Anchorage High School and Stanford University. He is married to Patty Ginsburg, a former journalist who now works as a consultant. He loves reading, music, travel, hiking, golf, and the natural and cultural splendor of Alaska.

Ivan Moore, pollster and owner of Ivan Moore Research, will speak at the monthly luncheon of Alaska Professional Communicators. In the days before the Nov. 6 General Election, as things heat up, Moore will provide his perspective and analysis on what the polls say and how to evaluate poll results. If you’ve been receiving dozens of survey phone calls and want some extra insight on who’s doing what, come hear the “inside story.” Moore is also a regular columnist for the Anchorage Press.

Ivan Moore

Toni Massari McPherson grew up on the East Coast and got her degree in journalism from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She came to Alaska during the ’70s after spending a year as a VISTA in Delaware and working for a small Pennsylvania newspaper for a couple years. She jumped into the Alaska adventure with both feet, including spending a year in a tepee while she and her firefighter husband built their home in Girdwood. She was a reporter and arts and entertainment director at the Anchorage Times until it closed. As the marketing director of Energy Rated Homes of Alaska for 10 years, she helped the program become the national standard for raising home energy efficiency. At the same time, she freelanced for a variety of local publications including Alaska Military Weekly, Alaska Newspapers and, most recently, F Magazine.

For the last 8.5 years, Toni has served as Anchorage Public Library’s Community Relations Coordinator, serving in a variety of roles including PR/marketing director, volunteer coordinator and program manager for the library’s book sales. She has worked with other staff to expand the library’s profile in the community and has witnessed an on-going metamorphosis in the local institution. Over the last year, the library has invested in a community-wide study of how it should evolve to serve Anchorage in the 21st century. In her talk she will describe some of the results of survey and how it is translating into the Loussac plan for re-modeling. She will also describe challenges the library faces moving into the future.

Toni McPherson

Bob Lyon started with photography by learning to do wet-plate tintypes, the kind of photography done during the Civil War. Since then he has done photojournalism—having work published in the Washington Post, Rugby Magazine, Der Speigel, Civilization Magazine, Mother Jones, L’Express, and the International Herald Tribune, among other print media. Bob specializes in large format photography, using a one hundred year old 4” x 5” Korona. Much of Bob’s large format work has been for the National Park Service in the Historic American Buildings Survey/Historic American Engineering Record programs.  These photographs are filed at the Library of Congress-‐think of the last scene in the first Indiana Jones movie—except these photographs are available online.

His projects have varied from Anasazi ruins in New Mexico to Minuteman III missile complexes in South Dakota. He also visited all 100 Air Force Missile Launch Control Centers in the 1990s to document their artwork. The missile crews painted their underground facilities, rather similar to nose art on bombers in World War II.

From Colorado and a resident of Anchorage for two years, Bob hasn’t produced many local images yet, but he is enthusiastically photographing the Alaska scene. Go here to see some of his work.

Bob currently works for the National Park Service in Anchorage, mainly tasked with historic preservation. One of the projects to which he has been assigned is the preservation of Soapy Smith’s saloon in Skagway, Alaska, at Klondike Gold Rush National Historical Park.

Contact information

Bob Lyon