Alaska Press Club Board
The Alaska Press Club board is made up of nine members, appointed in an annual election (as vacancies open) by the general membership and one student member.* Every full member has a vote. Board members serve two-year terms. Officers are named annually.
The Board has the authority to declare Board seats vacant and to appoint members to serve until the next general election.
* The student seat on the Board was created by a vote of membership at an annual Alaska Press Club meeting, April 17, 2004.
Current Members
Julia O’Malley President
Julia O’Malley is a metro columnist at the Anchorage Daily News. Over the last 15 years as a journalist, she has written for the Fairbanks News-Miner, the Anchorage Press, The Juneau Empire, PBS.org, and the Oregonian. Since coming to the Anchorage Daily News full time in 2005, she covered the court system and wrote extensively about life in Anchorage, including big changes in the city’s ethnic and minority communities.
Find her work at www.adn.com/jomalley .
Will Morrow Vice President
City Editor, Peninsula Clarion
Kathleen McCoy Vice President
Kathleen McCoy has worked as a journalist in Alaska since 1981, including 10 months at the Nome Nugget and 26 years at the Anchorage Daily News as a reporter, Sunday magazine editor, features editor, senior editor and assistant managing editor for features and interactivity. She left ADN in October, 2008 for an electronic media position at the University of Alaska Anchorage, adding video and audio podcasting to their Web site through the Advancement Office. McCoy obtained her journalism degree from UC Berkeley in 1975 and was a 2007 John S. Knight Fellow at Stanford University.
907-248-6662
Maia Nolan Vice President
Maia is the managing editor of Alaska Dispatch. She has a BA in English with a minor in journalism from the University of Portland and an MFA in creative writing from UAA, has been a Rasmuson Foundation artist project grant recipient, is former editor of the Catholic Anchor and a contributing essayist to Portland Magazine, and has appeared in or edited for Alaska publications including the ADN, the Anchorage Press, the News-Miner and Alaska Quarterly Review. Her personal blog is Own The Sidewalk.
Maia was elected Vice President of the Alaska Press Club in 2010.
907-433-4305
Rindi White Treasurer
Elected April 21, 2007. Rindi has reported on news in the Matanuska-Susitna Borough since shortly after moving to Alaska in 1999, beginning as a reporter for the Frontiersman Newspaper in Wasilla. Since December 2004, she has covered Mat-Su Borough government news for the Mat-Su Bureau of the Anchorage Daily News. Before moving to Alaska, Rindi worked at her hometown newspaper, the Wolf Point Herald-News in Wolf Point, and at the ASMSU Exponent, the college newspaper at Montana State University in Bozeman.
(907) 232-8599
Tom Hewitt Membership Coordinator
Tom Hewitt is a journalism and computer science major at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. A former editor-in-chief and current web editor of UAF’s student newspaper, The Sun Star, Hewitt was born and raised in Fairbanks, Alaska. He joined the Alaska Press Club Board in 2009.
In 2009, Hewitt had the opportunity to travel to Iraq with two other UAF journalism students and professor Brian O’Donoghue, where the team embedded for a month with the 1-25th Stryker Brigade in Diyala Province, north of Baghdad. The team sent back print stories, radio and broadcast packages to Alaska media outlets, as well as blog posts published at Alaska Dispatch and on the team’s blog, Short Timers.
Hewitt plans to graduate in May of 2011 with his journalism degree, and is optimistic for the future, reasoning that a job market where Pulitzer Prize winners are unemployed must be good for those with no real experience.
Ben Stanton New Boardmember, 2009
Journalist, KDLL 91.9 FM, covering Kenai, Soldotna, Sterling, Clam Gulch, Cooper Landing, Moose Pass, Ninilchik, Nikiski, Salamatof, Cohoe, Kasilof
Mark Thiessen New Boardmember, 2010
Mark Thiessen, 47, is the news editor in Alaska for The Associated Press.
He joined the AP in 1998 in the Omaha, Neb., bureau. In 2003, he was named day supervisor for the cooperative’s Salt Lake City bureau. Two years later, he was promoted to the Alaska post.
Thiessen is a native of Valley, Neb., and a 1985 graduate of Midland Lutheran College in Fremont, Neb., majoring in English and journalism.
After college he worked 13 years for a chain of suburban newspapers in Omaha, including 10 years with his hometown paper, the Douglas County Post-Gazette. He won several news writing and column writing awards from the Nebraska and Iowa press associations.
Thiessen and his partner of 17 years, Ron Barta, live in Anchorage with their dogs, Grissom and Chena.
