Sunday was Easter, and like most holidays in Nome – Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Years – the KNOM volunteers are far from their loved ones by virtue of their, well, being KNOM volunteers. In my year and a half as a volunteer, I’ve learned that there’s one silver lining to not being able to spend that [...]
About Matthew F. Smith
Author Archive | Matthew F. Smith
Subsistence (Or Something Like It)
Alaska is unique for many reasons, and one of the big ones is just how much food people get from natural or wild sources. Fish, game, and wild greens and berries all make up a substantial amount of the local diet. And with food prices very high in places like Nome, and even higher in [...]
Iditarod: This is it!
I just came back from first mic’ing my last 9am Iditarod update. The lead mushers were out of White Mountain this morning, finishing up a mandatory eight hour rest at the second-to-last checkpoint on the trail before they cross the finish line under the burled arch in Nome. In a few hours, maybe as early [...]
It Takes a Village (Trip)
I love to travel. I’ve been lucky enough in my brief 27 years on this planet to see quite a bit of it, and some interesting, off-the-beaten-path corners of it, too. The question “what brought you to Alaska?” is one I’ve asked – and been asked – a few times since moving to Nome. And [...]
Nome beyond KNOM
Though I’d had minimal experience working in radio before I applied to KNOM (the few shows I helped a friend with in college, mostly for laughs, barely count), I could mostly guess what a position on the news team was going to be like. (Exactly like Newsies, right?) The big question for me was, what [...]
Greetings, from Public Affairs
Good morning, internet. My name is Matthew Smith, and I’ll be blogging as KNOM’s volunteer Public Affairs Director. I work on the “news” side of the KNOM staff, but before we get to that, a little about me. After finishing college, I spent two years teaching English through the Maryknoll China Teacher’s Program. I moved [...]
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