Chilkat Valley News - Serving Haines and Klukwan, Alaska since 1966

Former Chilkat Valley News staffer Margaret Friedenauer started as news and public affairs director at KHNS this week.

Friedenauer, 35, took the reins from Tara Bicknell, who joined KHNS in 2008. Friedenauer filled in for CVN editor Tom Morphet last summer and for four weeks early this year and then handled website redesign and advertising for the newspaper.

“I look forward to just focusing on news,” Friedenauer said. “I’ve enjoyed that my job at the newspaper encompasses all aspects of the business, but I also am looking forward to just focusing on news at KHNS for a while.”

She worked as news editor at The Northern Light student newspaper at the University of Alaska Anchorage, the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, and daily newspapers in New Hampshire, New Mexico and Washington. Friedenauer’s time at the News-Miner included 10 weeks as an embedded journalist in Iraq, and she contributed military reporting to two articles in Newsweek.

Friedenauer said she looks forward to returning to daily news, and she likes the structure and function of public radio.

“I have to learn all the new programs, and I have to be more concise than you are when you’re a print journalist, but I think it will be an exciting, new medium,” she said. “It still requires writing, but it allows for a little more creativity and opportunity to use people’s voices more than you do in print.”

Friedenauer now will cover Skagway along with Haines and Klukwan, and she will oversee the KHNS news team.

CVN editor Morphet said listeners would be well served by Friedenauer’s hire. “Having two independent, probing media can only be good for the town.”

KHNS local news went on hiatus last week during the transition.