Katy Parrish cued up a video in the master control room of KACN-TV to show off some of the content the station airs. The video is a short spoof called The Attack of the Robot Men From Mars. It’s a comic homage to H.G. Wells’ classic sci-fi novel War of the Worlds, a story with a century’s worth of re-telling that spans theater, radio, film and TV. This version is in black-and-white. It incorporates live action, toy military vehicles and stop-motion clay animation. It’s action-packed and over in a couple minutes, like a decent punk rock song. The filmmaker, a teenager from Anchorage named Ben Johnson, stars in his own movie and has these lines: “They can’t be stopped!” and “I was wrong.”

“You can see why this was fun to play right before the E.A.N.,” Parrish says, as model spaceships stage a flyover of Washington D.C. on one of the 12 monitors in the control room.

For those who missed it, E.A.N. is for “Emergency Action Notification.” It’s one of several acronyms broadcasters use when talking about emergency broadcasts. On January 6, the government staged a statewide takeover of Alaska broadcasting, which included radio, TV and cable services. They did it to test a new code to be deployed only by the White House and only during a national emergency. (An invasion from Mars might qualify, but given the speed at which news travels, it seems unlikely a U.S. President would scoop anyone. The system seems predicated on the idea that a president might have important information to relay.) Parrish likes to think KACN might tweak noses in the government, or in mainstream media where news teams often fall over each other to report on government. She’s no pirate broadcaster. She describes herself as “a social worker with a camera,” though it might be more accurate to call her a social worker with a TV station. Her intent is to amplify voices she considers underrepresented in mainstream media. She runs an upstart non-profit in partnership with a commercial broadcasting company to get a TV signal across Alaska. (In Anchorage KACN is on GCI cable channel 95 and over the air on UHF channel 38. Statewide its on GCI cable channel 1.)

The station’s biggest strength might be its agreement with GCI cable to provide a 24-7 community access channel to every town and village GCI serves. Last week the station broadcast a live episode of It’s Not Over Yet, a program produced by Anchorage teenagers in an after-school program run by the Alaska Native Heritage Center. Three teenagers were on camera, playing a game based on the popular show Jeopardy, and answering questions about Yup’ik and Cup’ik culture in Southwest Alaska.

Parish says she knows other nonprofits would benefit by taking advantage of KACN’s signal. She’s a former director of an educational nonprofit called Stone Soup Group, and scored a grant to bring that group to commercial radio a few years ago. She says social documentaries and educational videos are common in the nonprofit world, but Alaska nonprofits often produce the videos and show them only to small audiences in classrooms.

“They’re passed around on DVD and just shelved,” she says, and she wants to bring those community videos to a larger audience. “It is a strength,” she says of the station’s statewide reach. “But with such a small staff it’s difficult to market that to other nonprofits.”

The station’s biggest weakness is that money is tight. Parrish says she hasn’t taken a salary for herself since early December, and she is waiting to hear about two major grant applications. Dan Etulain, who founded KACN, described the station with a rather grim analogy. “We do let people know, we are right now down to where the rope around our neck is pretty tight,” Etulain says.

Parrish talked about KACN’s mission while a monitor on the control room wall displayed a woman talking directly to the camera and moving her hands a lot. The woman with animated hands is teaching tips for toilet training children with developmental disabilities, Parish says. She’s one of the best teachers Parrish had ever met, by the way, and has one of those messages not often heard in media driven by cash and ratings.

“Nobody wants to talk about that stuff, or air content on it,” Parrish says. Children are sometimes kept out of first grade or kindergarten if they can’t use the restroom precisely at three o’clock, she says.

KACN is Etulain’s brainchild. He’s a 72-year-old commercial broadcaster who owns two NBC affiliates, in Sitka and Juneau. Etulain came to Alaska in 1971 to be dean of students at Sheldon Jackson College. This week he was in Bellingham, Washington where he was in hospital having a surgeon diagnose a problem in his spine, but he was game for a phone interview.

Etulain was watching the Fox News cable channel during a phone interview. He spoke briefly about how major TV channels are demanding increasingly higher fees from cable companies. (Fox’s owners were in a very public fight with Time Warner Cable in New York City last month over those fees. Fox threatened to pull its main network—the one that carries The Simpsons and American Idol—if Time Warner wouldn’t agree to pay a higher fee.)

“They like advertisements, because it adds to their income, but it’s not their main thing anymore,” Etulain says. “Here’s Gordon Liddy on right now. He’s selling Rosland Capital. That’s per-inquiry, I believe, so if you don’t call-up and buy it, [Fox] doesn’t get anything,” he says.

Etulain seems immersed in the shifting sands of the television landscape. He’s an avid reader of trade journals and has been fascinated by the medium since he was a child. He says he kept a TV set tuned to KING Seattle’s test pattern each morning waiting for the puppet show Kukla, Fran and Ollie to start. “I’d get so excited, because I knew something was about to start,” he says.

That excitement has a mirror, of sorts, in the control room of every TV or radio station. It’s not lost on Parrish or Etualin, both of whom get a kick out of placing programs on the air, especially programs they think no one else can afford to air. Etulain founded KACN with the motto “Bringing Rural and Urban Alaska Together,” which was recently shortened to “Uniting Alaska.”

“That’s my interest, my mission, my goal,” Etulain says. “It’s why we’re in business.”

His experience at Sheldon Jackson taught him that Native people across Alaska have issues in common and how connected they become, given the right venue. He noticed how Alaska news media, usually based in Anchorage and Fairbanks, left rural voices out of the conversation. (His own Juneau and Sitka channels might be an example. Both carry KTUU’s Anchorage-centric news broadcast because that’s what they can afford.)

Etulain’s company holds a commercial license for KACN, but he founded a nonprofit called Alaska Communications Center to program the channel. He didn’t see Anchorage as a profitable place for a new commercial station, but he describes his experience in public broadcasting as minimal. “I may have lots of friends [in public broadcasting] because of the 40 years, but I’m not a professional public broadcaster,” he says. “There’s seven other commercial stations, I think, in Anchorage. I knew that wasn’t where we were going to go.”

Statewide community TV appealed to Etulain’s educator side. He’s not alone. In December 2007, Juneau’s public TV station KTOO launched the satellite channel 360 North as a home to Gavel to Gavel, the show that covers the Alaska Legislature in a fashion similar to C-SPAN’s coverage of Washington D.C.

“I’d like to do high school games, you know East versus West. They would like to be recorded and nobody is doing that,” Etulain says. He spun ideas for TV shows from his hospital room. The station once broadcast a men’s league football game from Anchorage. A coach from the Alaska Wild shared the booth with a student broadcaster. Ten young people were trained to run cameras.

Another idea is to have rural residents who are in Anchorage hospitals just talk to the camera and send messages home, similar to the soldiers’ messages broadcasters relay during the holidays. “I’d like to do a show called My Hero,” he says, spinning another pitch. A child—from any village—would interview an elder they nominated for the show. The video would be sent to Anchorage for a little editing and post-production graphics, then broadcast around the state.

“Could that become appointment TV?” Etulain asks as if interviewing himself. “I think it could, if it has a news and public affairs included with it. We would probably play it four times a week.”

Parish and Etulain say they have just two rules for submissions: no porn and no hate. “We’ll accept anything as long as it’s not porno, or has obnoxiousness in it,” Etulain says. “There’s enough on TV where you can see people doing obnoxious things.”

Children now have 24-7 programs but may have never seen a test pattern, let alone used one to adjust a TV set or waited for a program to start. They know cameras. There’s one in almost every phone. And when it comes to channel surfing, they’re more TV-literate than their elders. They’ve got YouTube, but the most popular videos on the internet don’t usually rise to the level of storytelling or cultural exchange KACN aspires to broadcast.

Just watching TV won’t make a person video-literate in the same way creating a video will.

“There’s a huge problem with representation among Alaskan Natives in general, and with youth in particular. There just isn’t a lot of it in the media,” says Kelly Gwinn, who instructs teenagers in Alaska Native Heritage Center’s media program. “We’ve got the Jeanie Greene show, and unless you really go out of your way, that’s pretty much all you’re going to find.”

Jeanie Greene’s Heartbeat Alaska is one of the more mainstream programs on KACN and it’s aired weekly on commercial stations around the state, too. Greene’s crew is perpetually on the road, visiting villages around the state and filing feature stories about events such as dance celebrations, hunting and potlatches that Greene narrates with a perpetually cheerful enthusiasm. The teen program, It’s Not Over Yet, could become a complement, or counterpoint, to Greene’s show.

“A lot of my students have spent most of their lives living in Anchorage. They don’t really see themselves reflected in the stuff that is on the Jeanie Greene show, so that’s why I think it’s important for them to create their own media and have a chance to get that out there,” Gwinn says.

The taping of It’s Not Over Yet was an all-hands-on-deck affair in KACN’s studio. Gwinn, Parrish and one student ran cameras. Mark Sabel directed the show. He’s the station’s other full-time employee and the person with the most video experience in the room. He shoulder-surfed inside master control, giving direction to Parrish’s teenage son Wilson at the video mixer. The quiz show (and not every episode is a quiz show) aired live and was taped for rebroadcast. Athena Steinhilpert, an 18-year-old who attends South High School, hosted the show.

“After the ceremony, they did this to the masks because the powers they held are too dangerous,” Steinhilpert says. One teenager rings a bell on a table. “They burned them,” he says. “That is correct,” Steinhilpert says.

There’s about a half-hour of Steinhilpert quizzing two boys about Yup’ik culture and southwest Alaska. A paper game board is mounted on a wall behind the kids. Ceremonies and clothing are among the categories. One category defies the Yup’ik/Cup’ik theme. It’s called “Disney Quotes” and the two teenage boys ace all of the Disney questions, while doing a decent, but not perfect, job with the Yup’ik culture questions.

The inclusion of Disney might work as a metaphor: the power of corporate media to promote entertainment product while ignoring individual cultures. In a world where we can immerse ourselves in TV, it’s possible for people to know more about TV characters than they do about their neighbors across the street, or downriver in the next village.

Parrish begins each day in an office decorated with a poster of John Lennon with lyrics from “Imagine” on the wall, and a fabric art depiction of a reclining Buddha decorates her desk. She checks email and phone messages to see if any grant funding for the nonprofit has come in, or if any advertisers have responded. She peruses DVDs that have arrived in the mail. The U.S. Department of Defense videos are never aired. “They have enough of their own channels,” Parrish says. A new episode of Green House and outdoor programs such as Adventures North and American Outdoorsman will need to be loaded into the computers that run KACN’s programming cue.

Parrish is not fond of hunting shows, but hunting plays such an important role in rural Alaska she can’t ignore their value. “It’s very difficult for me to put those programs in the list, but it is an audience that I am trying to reach,” she says.

A lot of her day is tied to the control room. There’s a ton of automation in television, but one thing that still must be done by hand is data entry. She can’t ignore the importance of having accurate program descriptions appear when someone uses a GCI remote control to check what’s on scheduled on KACN. This is doubly important because KACN is not a genre channel, like Comedy Central or ESPN. Shows on KACN run a gamut from amateur shorts to slick interview shows produced by Alaska’s congressional delegation in Washington D.C.

Viewers who stumble on the channel are as likely see a lecture on potty training as a moose hunt, and cable TV’s ability to provide an onscreen program guide is the best way to resolve that problem. “It needs to have a description,” Parish says. “It can’t just say ‘KACN mix’—it needs to at least say whether it’s a documentary or a cooking show.”

Parish says it takes between two and four hours to program eight hours of KACN and update the new schedule for viewers.

“It’s very detail-oriented and it’s tedious. The fun part is when you know you have a show that’s really good and that nobody else would air,” she says, adding that she loaded KACN with environmental programs following the United Nations climate change conference last month. “After Copenhagen, for five or six days, I played shows about climate change in Alaska.”

scott@anchoragepress.com

View promo videos for KACN-TV here