Expect to hear some tales from the campaign trail.

Curtis Smith of the marketing firm Lottsfeldt-Smith will share some colorful stories about his most recent high profile assignment, serving as spokesman for the Sarah Palin gubernatorial campaign. Smith will also talk about his background as a journalist and how this has served him in his public relations career. Smith is a UAF journalism graduate who started out as a sportscaster at a Fairbanks television station. He later moved to Anchorage and worked as a reporter and anchor at KIMO-TV and KTUU-TV, where fans enjoyed his conversational, Matt Lauer-style of delivery.

Luncheon Information
Thursday, January 4
11:30 a.m.
Golden Lion Hotel
1000 East 36th Avenue
Anchorage

Lunch: members $16; others $18

Reservations: Email Thetus Smith a thetus@gci.net by noon., Tuesday, January 2, saying you want a reservation for lunch. If you will have guests with you, please include their names, too. Or you may call 274-4723 and leave a message.

More about Curtis Smith

Curtis Smith’s career path has taken some twists and turns that have often had his colleagues wondering just where he was headed. Five years ago, Smith probably wouldn’t have been able to answer that question, other than a gut feeling that his love of sports, politics and storytelling would eventually pay off.

This past summer, when Sarah Palin asked Smith to be her campaign spokesman, all those different streams converged into one rushing river.

For the Soldotna boy, who was practically raised on the family golf course, competition is second nature. It’s hard to say if all those years of perfecting birdies and averting bogeys is good preparation for the blood sport of Alaska politics, but the skills Smith honed as a reporter and anchorman were definitely a big help in fielding and anticipating questions from reporters.

Another job Smith took after leaving KTUU, Channel 2 — handling media for the State Division of International Trade — gave him an insider’s knowledge of government. Later he joined the marketing firm Northwest Strategies and most recently partnered with marketing and political strategist, Jim Lottsfeldt. Aside from candidate Palin, the Lottsfeldt-Smith firm has some high profile customers like ACS.

Smith’s career has had a bogey or two along the way, like his short-lived stint earlier this year as an Anchorage talk radio host. Just one more opportunity to learn from experience. Whether it’s golf or public relations, it’s all about avoiding the sand traps. But if you get stuck, one of the secrets of success is knowing how to extricate yourself and get on with the game, something Smith knows a lot about.

And as if politics and golf weren’t enough, he’s also the proud father of two children. His wife Jody is a teacher.

Elizabeth Bradfield recently spoke to Alaska Professional Communicators about how she created Broadsided Press. The content of her presentation is available here by clicking on the screen below, or by linking directly to YouTube. Thanks to student member Jerami Marsh for taping, editing, and posting the first of APC’s luncheons to be available online.

You can also read Carolyn Rinehart’s summary of Bradfield’s presentation.

by Carolyn Rinehart

Our December speaker, Elizabeth Bradfield, is an innovator, so it seems fitting that she is the first to have her talk digitally recorded. Jerami Marsh, a new student member from UAA who did the recording, checked the video and audio after the Dec. 7 luncheon and reported that it was of good quality.

He plans to edit the movie, taking out “dead space and bloopers,” and insert slides from the show Liz presented. He hopes to have it posted in a week or so (about Dec. 14), but said this first one may take a little longer.

A link to the video will be on the APC website. The recording is intended for anyone interested, but especially for our out-of-Anchorage members, including student members in Fairbanks. There will be a low-quality video for dialup internet users and a high-quality version for broadband users.

Something’s missing from our streets and public bulletin boards, and Liz Bradfield wants to put it back.

It’s the broadside. Common in past centuries, these single sheets were posted in towns across the nation. They carried announcements, advertisements, political commentary, song lyrics, cartoons, and poems. They encouraged thought and public discourse.

They championed the cause of a woman’s right to vote, and they provided a place for the early “beat” poets to get their poems read. Some current poets, such as Adrienne Rich, issue illustrated broadsides of their poems that are framed in galleries and sell for hundreds of dollars.

Believing that the on-street broadside has a place in today’s world, Bradfield started Broadsided Press a year ago with the goal of putting art and literature on the streets.

One broadside a month appears on the site, each with an original poem and artwork to illustrate it. Writers e-mail their work to the press. Once Bradfield and her co-editor Mark Temelko have selected a piece for publication, she sends it out to her stable of 21 artists, and the first one to request the right to illustrate that poem gets it.

One of the first poems to be published was “Green,” by APC member Linda McCarriston, now living in Fairbanks. It’s one of the most frequently downloaded, Bradfield said. Other titles include “Sketch of an Astronaut” and “Edison in Love.”

For distribution, Bradfield, who lives in Anchorage, relies on her “vectors”—friends of the site in cities and towns across the nation. The vectors download the broadsides, print, and post them. Vectors are in 25 states at present, plus Canada, England, and Germany.

No money changes hands; the site exists purely for the love of literature and art, Bradfield said. Her only costs are her time and the cost of web hosting for the site, about $40 per year. (She’s exploring some money-making opportunities from it, however.)

Bradfield’s background prepared her for her grassroots publication venture. She is a recognized poet whose works have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Poetry, the anthology Best New Poets 2006,and other outlets. A graduate of the University of Alaska Anchorage with a fine arts degree, she did collaborative work with artists at the Vermont Studio Center.

She acquired Web experience through doing editorial work for Moms Online, a parenting website, in the 1990s. She particularly liked developing the online community of mothers, which gave her the idea for the artists’ and writers’ community of Broadsided Press.

Bradfield is also a Web designer and a naturalist. Her firm, Pelagic Design, creates websites to swim in the “open ocean” of the internet.

She wants to see Broadsided Press grow, and perhaps her talk to APC will help her do that.

APC member Lesley Thomas will be on the faculty at the Kachemak Bay Writers’ Conference, June 8-12, 2007, in Homer, Alaska.

Among her co-teachers are Nick Jans and Nancy Lord, both long-time Alaskans and naturalist writers of Alaska. Amy Tan, award-winning author of The Joy Luck Club, is the keynote speaker.

More about Lesley
Lesley said that Randy Howell, editor of Arctic Sounder, writes that her book, Flight of the Goose, is “a wonderful tale.” Dave Hunsaker, Alaska screenplay writer of Juneau, is working on adapting the novel to film. Lesley spoke to Alaska Professional Communicators in April 2006. Read the synopsis of that talk.