Andrea Kobrinsky Alday

In my current position as Communications Manager with The Wilderness Society, I direct media outreach and collaboration with community partners on priority California campaigns. The Wilderness Society is the leading American conservation organization working to protect the nation's shared wildlands and to inspire Americans to care for wild places.

I'm proud to have also spent five years as a program manager of the USC Annenberg California Endowment Health Journalism Fellowships - an experience that raised my awareness of the connections between access to nature, outdoor activity and community health.

My journalism background includes more than 20 years working as a writer, producer and editor for television, public radio and internet news outlets in San Francisco and Los Angeles. After graduating from San Francisco State University, I began my career at the local ABC owned station, KGO-TV, where I worked as an assignment editor and writer-producer as part of the news team that earned a George Foster Peabody Award and an Emmy Award for coverage of the 1989 Loma Prieta Earthquake. As a line producer, I launched the first Sunday Morning News program at KGO-TV, and working in both the News and Programming Departments, I was senior producer for a series of live town hall broadcasts, multi-part series and half-hour news specials, covering controversial issues in public education, immigration, abortion, domestic violence and the AIDS epidemic.

In 1993, I became a fellow at the University of Southern California’s Center for International Journalism, working and studying in Los Angeles and Mexico City, and traveling to Cuba along with colleagues from the United States, Mexico and Canada. The program spanned a tumultuous year marked by the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas, the Northridge earthquake in Los Angeles and the 1994 presidential election in Mexico. Later, I produced segments for the innovative MSNBC television program, The Site, as well as for the news and political interview program To the Point, co-produced by Public Radio International and public radio station KCRW. I also gained experience as a Web site news editor at television station KNBC in Burbank. More recently, as a freelance editor at Southern California Public Radio station KPCC, I lead reporting teams covering business, emerging communities, education and politics and government.