Twenty APC members took honors in the National Federation of Press Women 2009 Communication Contest, after earning first-place awards at the state level in their respective categories. Winners include:

•Tina Adair, first, Reports - External Annual Report
•Tammy Ashley, second, Community or Institutional relations
•Sheila Balistreri, first, Best newscast (commercial or non-commercial station) – Television, and first, Best presentation (anchor, sportscaster or play-by-play sports reporter) - Television
•Dianne Barske, first, Children’s books - Non-fiction
•Katie Bausler, HM, Brochure - Four-color
•Kalei Brooks, second, News or feature release - single release - News release, and third, News or feature release - single release - Feature release
•Jessica Cochran and Steven Heimel, first, Special programming (documentary, public affairs or editorial) - Radio
•Dee Gould, HM, Photography in printed publication other than newspaper - Feature photo
•Judith Griffin, second, Book edited by entrant including poetry books or poetry magazine
•Diane Haecker, second, Special articles - Science (technology, ecology, environment, energy, “green issues”), first, Special articles - Social issues (family, minority affairs, welfare, women, the elderly, or consumerism) and second, Photographer-writer
•Therese Harvey, first, “Personal column on the air” or critic’s review - Radio
•Stan Jones, second, Fiction, novel (full-length, 40,000 words and up)
•Steven Levi, second, Non-fiction, book – History, and second, Young adult books - Non-fiction
•Amy Murphy, first, Newspaper, trade paper, magazine, newsletter or Web site - black/white print electronic display (single ad) - Institutional or image, and first, Reports - Internal Annual Report
•Elise Patkotak, second, Columns – General, and second, Newsletter - One- to three-color
•Yereth Rosen, second, Feature story - Daily newspaper, and second, Special articles - Government or politics
•Sherrie Simmonds, third, Web site edited by entrant, first, Public service, and third, Direct mail marketing
•Thad Woodard, HM, Interview - Radio
•April Young, second, Best presentation (anchor, sportscaster or play-by-play sports reporter) - Radio

A summary of our June 4, 2009 speaker, Mary Katzke
By Kay Vreeland

Mary Katzke, whose media production company Affinityfilms Inc. completed the documentary “About Face” in January 2009, spoke at the Alaska Professional Communicators luncheon June 4, explaining how the film was made, its story, and its future.

The film’s subject, Gwendellin Bradshaw, was horribly disfigured as a baby after her mentally ill mother threw her into a campfire. At the age of three, the girl lived next door to Katzke. Hearing children’s cries of “roast beef,” Katzke ran outside to find Gwen being pelted with rocks, and rescued her.

So began a long relationship. In crisis at age 24, Gwen decided to tell her story. Over the next five years, Katzke filmed the journey of Gwen’s search for her mother and for healing.

Documentary films are enormously expensive to produce, and it took four and a half years to raise half the budget for this one, said Katzke. A forty-minute segment of the film, completed and shown nationally, helped leverage its Alaskan origins and secured support for the remaining half of the budget within six months.

The film was made using four different video formats, interspersed with old black-and-white 8-mm footage to represent the memory of the injured child.

Now in the distribution phase, “About Face” was on the finalists’ list for Best Mid-Length Documentary at Toronto’s 2009 HotDocs Canadian International Documentary Festival. There are currently 15 requests for screening, across the U.S. as well as in Korea and Australia.

Katzke’s next project is to publish a discussion guide to accompany the film for training those who work with the homeless, the mentally ill, and women with postpartum depression.

Background information about Mary Katzke is on the Web site of Alaska Professional Communicators; the story and trailer of the film are at the “About Face” Web site.

The next Alaska Professional Communicators luncheon will be in September 2009; look for announcements and schedule in early August.

Affinityfilms
Alaska Professional Communicators
About Face Web site

A summary of our May 7, 2009 speakers, Magical Masks authors from the Home Base After School Program: Mary Rhodes Rasheed, Cecilia Mora Pitts, Randall Wilson – with program coordinator Shirley Mae Springer Staten

by Barbara Brown

On May 7, Alaska Professional Communicators were treated to a slide show and presentation by students from the Home Base After School Program, who recently authored a children’s book and presented it to children in Ghana, Africa. The Home Base program is offered to 4th through 8th graders who live in the Fairview and Muldoon neighborhoods. All students sign a contract that they will remain with the hands-on program for three years.

In polished, well-orchestrated and vivid presentations, the students told us of many adventures, including how they met a U.S. senator, the U.S. ambassador to Ghana, and a man who flew solo around the world. The book they wrote and the trip they took to Ghana are outlined here, so I will give you some of the extra impressions the students shared.

Mary Rhodes Rasheed, one of the first Home Base students to sign on, showed off yet another of their projects: “If I Could Change the World” posters. Mary’s called for “No Smoking.” Later, she shared her poem, “Dream to Reality.”

Cecilia Mora Pitts recited her poem “The Sky Is the Limit,” and explained that Magical Masks, their book, had been conceived simply as a gift to bring the children of Africa.

Randall Wilson described the expectations he had of Africa, fostered by the media in this country. He expected small villages, sad faces and ill and hungry children. Instead, he found happy kids and big cities, but he did find poverty, too. Kids didn’t have shoes, and their schools were so poorly equipped, the benches designed to hold two students had to hold four. The only technology in the classroom: a chalkboard. He also found it was so hot, he couldn’t breathe at first!

In a visit to “the slave castle”—a castle in Cape Coast, Ghana, used as dungeons in the slave trade—the students heard that pregnant women had been thrown overboard, that slaves could exercise only once or twice a week, and that if they broke into a sweat, they were returned to the dungeon. A sign over the castle door read “Door of No Return,” because once captives left, they would board boats never to return to their homeland. When the Home Base students entered, they felt that there is finally another sign: “Door of Return.”

Cecilia was profoundly moved by her visit to an orphanage. There were no diapers; they used rags and safety pins. The Home Base kids provided sanitizer, but even bathing the babies in tubs with reused water felt unhygienic to the students. They experienced the difficulties of hauling water to make the day’s porridge. But they gave out stickers to the kids and were surprised when the kids pasted them all over their faces.

To arrive at the end of their journey, a village on stilts in the south of Ghana, they all had to take off their shoes and wade out into “hot, gooey water.” Finally, Strong Young African Men (Shirley Mae’s words) took them in canoes through the forest. The village will be the beneficiary of some of the proceeds from the sale of Magical Masks, and the village chief wondered how anyone had even heard they existed.

The students saw elephants, wart hogs—and even got into horseplay with baboons. But the real impact of the trip? Randall said he’d take his own education more seriously and pray for the kids in Africa. What a testimony to the wonderful work Shirley Mae Springer Staten has done as the director of the program. She took kids out of Fairview and gave them the world!

APC members Vera Starbard, Jessica Golden, and Joan Harris have received project grants from the Rasmuson Foundation. Read more in the article that appeared in the Anchorage Daily News.

A summary of our April 2, 2009 speaker, Stan Jones
by Barbara Brown

Twenty years ago, on March 24, 1989, 11 million gallons of crude oil were dumped in Prince William Sound when the Exxon Valdez tanker went aground.

At the time, Stan Jones was a reporter with the Anchorage Daily News, covering the spill. Now, Jones works his “day job” as the Director of External Affairs for the Prince William Sound Regional Citizens’ Advisory Council (RCAC), the nonprofit body designed to serve as watchdog for the safety of crude oil transportation in the Sound.

For the 20th Anniversary of the spill, Jones teamed with oral historian Sharon Bushell to write The Spill: Personal Stories from the Exxon Valdez Disaster. He delivered a PowerPoint presentation and remarks at the April 2 luncheon.

Jones began by discussing prevention strategies put in place post-Spill. The Oil Pollution Act of 1990 requires the phase-out of single-hulled tankers by 2015. If the Exxon Valdez had had a double-hull, the spill would have been reduced by 60 percent, which illustrates that this is not a fool-proof method: 4 million gallons would still have polluted the Sound. Combine double hulls with the two-tug escort system now in place (the Exxon Valdez was unescorted by the time it reached Bligh Reef) and prevention is much improved. However, the Oil Pollution Act allows the phase-out of escorts as double-hulled tankers are brought into operation. The RCAC is fighting this phase-out.

The Exxon Valdez left the tanker lanes in 1989 to avoid icebergs. A later risk assessment identified icebergs in tanker lanes as “among the most significant risks to crude oil tankers,” so RCAC funded research and computer software development for ice-detection radar (to distinguish ice from water).

Improvements have been made to response, training, and contingency planning for any future spills. In 1989, fishermen were using five-gallon buckets to pick up oil; now, oil-skimming systems can pick up 12 million gallons in 72 hours. In 1989, there were five miles of containment boom; now there are 71 miles.

But asked whether there have been advances in clean-up technology, Jones replied, “Not really.” That’s why the emphasis has to be on prevention. Nowadays beaches may be left oiled because clean-up can do greater damage.

The fallout from the Spill remains with us today. Whether it’s oil on the beaches, economic impacts on fishermen, or lasting effects on wildlife, the disaster lingers. Witness this photo, taken on Smith Island Beach June 26, 2008, and tell us the Sound has “healed.”

In identifying the personal stories Jones and Bushell planned to include in their book, they decided to interview only people “with oil on their boots,” the people up close to the disaster.

Several highlights from Stan Jones’ PowerPoint (including quotes from the book) follow:

“The window of opportunity was in the first forty-eight hours, and for the first forty-eight hours we at Alyeska were trying to figure out what the hell to do.” — Gary Bader, Alyeska

“We had to do something, even if it was just looking busy.” — Adm. Clyde Robbins, USCG

“There was a seal that had been screaming for hours, trying to get on her boat, trying to get out of the oil. The sound of a seal’s scream is exactly like that of a baby, and it kept hitting the side of the hull, trying to get on board.” — Tom Copeland, Cordova fisherman

“I would like to offer an apology, a very heartfelt apology, to the people of Alaska.” — Joe Hazelwood, captain of the Exxon Valdez