Christine Anewalt started at KPNX-TV as an account executive just over a year ago and has made an immediate impact in our community and industry. She closed an $18,000 new business sale in her first week and was off and running from there. Among her biggest accomplishment thus far has been turning a sale with a local nonprofit into a station-wide promotion called Summer of a Million Meals. The program helped the organization leave food on their shelves for the first time in their 35 years, addressing Arizona’s food insecurity issue. As a direct result of this campaign, the nonprofit also received a grant from the Piper Foundation to rebuild their warehouse with A/C to better provide meals to over 200 agencies in the Valley.

In her second year, Christine continued to specialize in working with nonprofits, and was recognized this year with Tegna’s prestigious President’s Circle award naming her as one of 25 top performing sales professionals in the company.

It’s so abundantly clear why Christine is a model newcomer into Arizona broadcasting, especially at a time when innovation in media sales is so critical, and we look forward to recognizing her contributions this fall as a Newcomer of the Year for 2019!

Courtland Jeffrey has quickly made a name for himself in Arizona broadcasting by using data to create visualizations like few have seen before! He graduated from Arizona State’s Cronkite School with a focus in data visualization, and put that skill straight to work when he was hired by KNXV-TV to help innovate and better explain data-driven stories to Arizona audiences.  Courtland’s role lends itself to endless experimentation as we see new technology emerge.

Examples of his data visualization content include a database of “Fake Doctors” he created for the station’s investigative, award-winning series, a 360-degree interactive video on Facebook about the holiday “Lights of the World” exhibit that reached an audience of more than 1.5 million people, and the station’s #1 traffic driving story of 2018 (an interactive sex offender map).

Oftentimes, Courtland’s content is so strong, it is picked up by his station’s corporate team and shared nationwide. He mapped out mass shootings in the U.S. for all of 2018, and it was often one of the top results on Google for nationwide searches.

For all of these reasons and more, Courtland is among the best example of a newcomer in our business who is already making waves, and that’s why we look forward to honoring him this September as an Arizona Broadcasters Newcomer of Year for 2019.

In the short 2.5 years Griselda Zetino has been part of the KTAR team, she has grown into one of the best examples of a jack-of-all trades and model for the future reporter. She goes on-air, excels in writing for the web and has become the station’s go-to resource for some of the most important and difficult topics based on her study of and hunger for information.

Zetino most recently led KTAR’s coverage of the Red for Ed Movement. From there, she started continuing coverage titled “The Changing Face of the Arizona Teacher,” where she explored the impact of Red for Ed on the 2018 Election. Griselda was the first reporter of any English-speaking TV or radio station to break the story of busloads of Central American immigrants released by ICE and dropped off at churches across the Valley.

When news editors, reporters or producers don’t know who to reach out for a story dealing with public policy, they go to Griselda. The same can be said when looking for contacts in the Hispanic community, or that deal with social issues affecting Latinos in Arizona. She sits on the board of the Arizona Latino Media Association and each year assists in spreading the knowledge of broadcast journalism to high school students interested in the field.

Griselda may be new in our business, but as far as making waves go, she is leading the way at KTAR. The Arizona Broadcasters Association can’t wait to honor her as a 2019 Newcomer of the Year!