Patricia Kakridas: rising fast from “one-man band” reporter to TV anchor in Illinois
by Dimitri C. Michalakis
Patricia Kakridas is now the morning and noon anchor on WAND-TV in Decatur, Illinois and no longer has to lug around her own camera and shoot her own video as she once did as a beat reporter.
But she sometimes misses that.
“That’s probably my major complaint,” says the 28-year-old Californian (though she was born in New York and once lived in the Dominican Republic). “I love going out and getting the story and being the one to break a story or do the investigating. I do miss that quite a bit.”
Not that being an anchor is a slouch. She gets up at 2:30 in the morning to get ready for her morning newscast, and then does periodic news updates on the Today Show throughout the morning, and may stay longer as the news day dictates. And when she’s not on-air she’s boning up on the news and goes to sleep watching the last news update.
“I want to be more than an anchor,” she says. “I want to be somebody who rises through the ranks, but is also respected by viewers. I’d like to be somebody like Christiane Amanpour, who is respected and is also a TV icon and not just a pretty face. I would like to be looked on as a true journalist.”
Does that mean becoming the hard-charging foreign correspondent?
“I don’t think that’s necessary,” she says. “Things have changed a lot since the days of Peter Jennings and Tom Brokaw and Ted Koppel, who are a great example. These men were able to stay in-house and still be respected. Peter Jennings knew how to get a viewer’s trust and knew how to get educated on subjects. That’s important: to be an educated broadcast journalist and not just someone who looks good on TV.”
Perhaps that’s her training as a writer talking or her background in politics. After graduating from the University of California, Davis with a B.A. in political science she began to work for then-California Assemblywoman Elaine Kontominos Alquist (who is now a state senator).
She then skipped to doing PR for a private lobbying firm serving clients such as the California Association of Alcohol & Drug Programs and the City of West Hollywood.
“It was just a lot of office work,” she says, “sitting in an office and doing the same stuff every day.”
She left that to campaign for a school bond measure for the city of Roseville that passed with more than 50 % “which was actually the most fun I had in politics. It was grassroots legwork, as opposed to sitting in an office and doing the same thing every day.”
Then a family friend who worked for the local Fox station mentioned that they were looking for a writer and she gathered her press releases and features she had done for The National Herald and sent them in.
“And they hired me,” she says. “Then they switched me from freelance to full-time and they asked me to be an associate producer.”
She was there for two years, and then moved to the Eureka station (“It’s obvious in this business that you have to move up,” she admits) where she finally got to hit the street as a reporter and get on the air regularly.
“It was exhilarating, I have to say,” she recalls of her first broadcast (she made it on the air at age 25). “I did the voice-over first and it was really exciting—I wanted to show it to all my friends and family. We had links online and I would send them links every week.”
She also became what she says was a “one-man band.” “Which means, I carried my own equipment, shot my own video, edited my own video and wrote the story. And I did about three or four stories a day—more than that when we were shorthanded. You’re in a small market and you have to produce a lot. Basically, you go through the ropes.”
She survived on adrenaline and coffee (“Starbucks took a lot of my salary, which wasn’t much to begin with”) and she also had fun. “I enjoyed everything about it,” she says. “It was fun, it was really fun. It was always different and it was always hard, but I worked in politics and my worst day in this business is still better than some of my good days in politics.”
She also got to meet her boyfriend on the job, Ross Frasier, who is now her producer and “he’s not Greek, though he wishes. He’s really part of the family.”
Her family is back in California (her father Dimitri, a developer, mother Kathy, a former travel agent, and younger sister Georgette, who graduated from the University of Indianapolis and is a public relations and marketing major).
“I grew up in California and we did travel a lot,” she says. (She has relatives from Colorado to New York and Queens, where she was born in Jackson Heights.) “Now I travel a lot exploring the Midwest, where everything is so close.”
And as a TV anchor, she’s often recognized, which is among the perils of the trade.
“Because I have a Greek name people always ask me if I know how to make Greek food,” she laughs.
