Southwest Iowa Neighborhood Reporter - Mills County Upbringing Helped Prepare Katrina Markel For Journalism Career

Her ambitions have taken her to the bright lights of some of the world’s largest and most glamorous cities – New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Mumbai (India) and Dundee (Scotland), yet Mills County native Katrina Markel is finding fulfillment these days telling stories about the people and community she moved away from three decades ago.

For the past 18 months, Markel has been the Southwest Iowa Neighborhood Reporter for Omaha television station KMTV 3.

“I absolutely have a better appreciation of where I grew up and I think reporting on it has been a unique opportunity to get to know even more about the place that I’m from and all these towns that maybe I’ve heard of or drove through,” Markel said during a recent interview. “Now, I actually know people in these communities. I know where the good coffee shop is in Harlan or where I can get donuts in Shenandoah.”

Live Theater
Markel spent her childhood in Mills County – the early years in Silver City before her family moved to Glenwood when she was 7 years old. She attended elementary, middle school and her first year of high school in Glenwood before transferring to Abraham Lincoln High School in Council Bluffs.

“At the time, there were more extra-curricular activities for me in Council Bluffs,” Markel said. “It was just a bigger school – they actually had a TV news program, which was pretty unusual in the early ‘90s, but that wasn’t even the reason I went up there. I went up there because they had a big theater department at the time. I was able to focus more on performing at A.L.”

Markel had aspirations of becoming a professional theater actress when she was a young girl. She was introduced to live theater at the age of 5 in the Mills Masquers’ production of The King And I.

“It was the first play I ever did,” Markel recalled. “I think my mom just kind of got me in because they needed a lot of kids and she thought it would be good for my confidence.

“I was one of the younger ones and definitely the tiniest.”

She enjoyed being part of the production but Markel said “the theater bug” didn’t actually bite until a couple years later when as a second-grader she performed in a live production of Scrooge at the Malvern Community Center.

“They brought in someone from Omaha to direct it,” she recalled. “Bill Gilbert was the music director and it was a community production in Malvern at the community center, on the stage there.”

Once she caught the acting bug, Markel was hooked. She began pursuing other roles with the Mills Masquers and throughout the Omaha-Council Bluffs metro area.

“I knew that Zach Finken (from Glenwood) was auditioning and doing plays in Omaha,” Markel said. “I had to audition several times before I finally cracked that and got a role at the Emmy Gifford Children’s Theater. I did Amelia Bedelia and Annie there and I was kind of off and running.”

Markel played many characters as a child actress but two or three of the roles stand out as her favorites.

“It would be easy, I suppose, to say Annie but I did Really Rosie at the Jewish Community Center. That’s based on a children’s book by Maurice Sendak, who is more known for Where The Wild Things Are. That was my first lead role – I was 13.

“Locally, playing Dorothy in the Wizard Of Oz (Mills Masquers) was a big deal for me,” too. I was 17 and I got really sick at the beginning of rehearsals. I ran myself so ragged as a teenager being involved in so many extra-curricular activities.”

Markel remembers being on stage with Marland Gammon and some of the other regular performers during that time period at the Mills Masquers theater.

“Jeff DeYoung directed me in Brighton Beach Memoirs and that was a fun show. Scott Hite was doing a lot of shows then, too.”

When she was 14, Markel and his sister Celine both performed with the Nebraska Theater Caravan, going on tour during the holiday season staging A Christmas Carol. Katrina played one of the Cratchit kids.

“We were paid for that,” she recalled. “That was like an early professional experience.”

As a teenager, Markel was recognized twice by the Theater Arts Guild in Omaha as the metro area’s Outstanding Youth Actress for two roles she had at the Bellevue Little Theater – Emily in Our Town and Juliet in Romeo and Juliet.

Speech, Oratorical Contests

In addition to acting, speech was another activity Markel excelled in as a child.

As Markel pointed out, Glenwood had some exceptional speech coaches at both the middle school and high school levels in the late 1980s and early ‘90s – Steve Swanson, Mike Schmidt, Marianne Driml and Carolee Heath, to name a few.

As a Glenwood Middle School sixth grader, Markel won the Optimist State Speech Contest. The next year, she was Glenwood’s first national champion at the Modern Woodman Of America Oratorical Contest. She also earned honors in some American Legion and VFW speech contests.

“I think because I had done so much theater work by sixth or seventh grade, my presentation skills were just a little more polished than a lot of kids,” Markel said.

In addition to having outstanding speech coaches, Markel said the Glenwood Community School District had strong English teachers at the same time.

“For sure, Mills County gave me my start with both theater and any sort of communication,” she said. “We had good English departments in Glenwood when I was growing up.  I learned to write and liked writing.”

During her final three years of high school at Abraham Lincoln, Markel got her introduction to producing a television news program – the A.L. Insider, which was filmed and edited at a cable access studio in Council Bluffs.

“I really liked the TV journalism program at A.L.,” Markel said. “I learned to edit old-fashioned tape-to-tape. You take it off one tape and record it to another. It’s good to know, now with digital editing, how stuff was put together back then. I liked it (TV) and I knew I was pretty good at it.”

NYU Scholarship
Markel graduated from Abraham Lincoln High School in 1994 and enrolled at New York University to pursue a degree in theater.

“It wasn’t inevitable that I was going to go to school there, but I ended up getting the best scholarship at NYU,” she said. “That’s why I took it and it involved international travel that was included with the scholarship program.”

At NYU, Markel worked on earning her Bachelor Of Fine Arts degree in acting, but also continued to develop a stronger interest in film and television. Many of her friends were film and TV students and she started doing some special projects with them on the side.

By the time she had completed her bachelor’s degree, she was also doing some live theater directing.

“I spent the first few years out of college directing little plays literally in church basements,” she said. “It was Off, Off Broadway. (At the time) I’m still in New York sharing a one-bedroom apartment with my college roommate and really living a starving-artist lifestyle.”

Markel was directing theater productions at night and doing other jobs during the day to pay the bills. It was during this time that Markel decided she wanted to go to graduate school and study filmmaking. She was a finalist for a spot at UCLA but didn’t get in.

Homecoming Documentary

Still living in New York, Markel decided she would make a film on her own.

“I thought if I want to make a film, I’m just going to make a film and the low-hanging fruit was to do something on Glenwood’s Homecoming, which I knew was unique,” she said. “I had friends with cameras and editing equipment – the things I needed.”

Operating on a shoestring budget, Markel convinced a friend to travel with her to Glenwood in the fall of 1999 to make a documentary about the community’s Homecoming celebration. Markel and her friend spent two weeks in Glenwood filming every angle to Homecoming that she could think of – from the float building, pep rallies and class reunions to the football game, Outcast dance and coronation ceremony. She interviewed dozens of Glenwood citizens to get their take on the community celebration.

Markel was 23 years old at the time and the former classmates she had grown up in Glenwood were having their 5-year class reunion that year.

“I didn’t know what I was doing at all and looking back on it, I made so many mistakes. It feels like a student project because it basically was” she said. “I made it into a much bigger production than it really needed to be but I didn’t know what (footage) I was going to use. I was trying to include everybody and everything in it, but I did learn a lot from that.”

Markel returned to New York after filming in her hometown but it wasn’t until a few years later that Glenwood got to see the finished product – Homecoming 1999. It took Markel several years to get grant funding needed to get the film edited.  The film was eventually screened at Glenwood High School and Middle School during at a subsequent Homecoming celebration. The film, nearly 1 hour and 45 minutes in length, is available for viewing on youtube.

A Decade Of Travel

Shortly after making the documentary, Markel turned her attention to earning a master’s degree in journalism. She chose a program at NYU focused on documentary and long-form film making.

“I thought that’s what I was going to do – documentaries and long-form,” she said. “There was probably other programs I would have chosen had I known I was going to be back doing daily news in the next 20 years.”

The next decade would take Markel to California, Scotland, back to California, India and finally back to her hometown.

The man who would become Markel’s husband, Paul Wrider, was working in video games. His job took him to Los Angeles so Markel followed  him to the West Coast, landing a low-level production job herself at a L.A. television station. They moved to San Francisco when Paul landed a job with Lucas Arts. At that point, Markel pivoted to doing marketing work for tech and start-up companies. They were married during their time in California.

“Because of his video game career, which took off a little before mine and he made more money, we ended up following that around,” Markel said.

By the time they had moved to India, Markel was transiitiong to online marketing work. They stayed in India for about a year.

“After India, when his job there kind of fell apart, we came back and moved back to Glenwood,” she said. “We lived in in my childhood home for about five years. That was maybe 10 years ago.”

ReturnTo Glenwood

After her return to Glenwood, Markel got a job in marketing and also started righting some theater reviews for the Daily Nonpareil newspaper in Council Bluffs.

“I was doing it because I was getting free tickets and I was also getting a byline and getting back into journalism,” she said. “That kind of led to writing features for the (Omaha) World-Herald and that eventually led to me doing a lot of writing on the side for Omaha magazine.Those kind of free-lance jobs don’t pay a lot but I was really doing it because I missed journalism. It was a way to keep that going, even if it was part-time.

“I really didn’t know if I’d get back into journalism full-time, I thought that ship had sailed.”

Markel’s life took a difficult turn in 2018 when her husband Paul died after an extended illness.

Then came the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.

“When the pandemic happened, I lost the marketing job and I just kind of doubled down on the free-lancing for awhile,” she said. “After about six months, a job opened here (KMTV) – the digital manager. I had a mix of print, I had worked in TV at one point and I had worked in digital marketing for a long time. All of those things came together in a way that was kind of unexpected and that’s when I got back into news full-time.”

As digital manager, Markel oversaw a team of employees responsible for managing the station’s digital content and website. Her job was going fine until the station’s parent company had a change in strategy and eliminated the digital desk in 2023. Markel’s job was eliminated, but the idea that she apply for a multimedia journalist position was quickly floated at the station.

Markel was confident she could handle the job but it would mean getting caught up on the newest technology when it comes to handling a camera and editing. Speaking in front of a camera wouldn’t be a problem because of her speech and performance backgrounds. There was also the age, thing. Markel was in her mid-40s.

“It’s unusual to make that shift at middle age, so then you have to get used to looking at yourself not as a 22-year-old,” she said. “It’s OK that I’m a few pounds heavier. It’s OK that gravity is starting to take effect or the chin is not as tight as it was at one point.”

Mills County Connections

At the same time Markel was about to pivot into her new job as a multimedia journalist, KMTV was also converting to a neighborhood reporting model, which meant individual reporters would be assigned a specific area or neighborhood in the KMTV viewing area to cover. Markel was the logical choice to take on the Southwest Iowa Neighborhood Reporter position.

Two of Markel’s first on-air stories brought her to Mills County. She interviewed Glenwood Tree Board member Tom Hoogestraat for a story on Emerald Ash Borer and did a harvest story with a local farmer.

“I did a harvest story with Larry O’Rourke, which was fun because I’ve known Larry’s family my whole life,” she said. “I was riding around in a combine with him.”

Those two stories aired 18 months ago. Since then, Markel has done dozens of stories on people and pertinent issues on the Iowa side of the Missouri River. Southwest Iowans are starting to recognize Markel as the Omaha television reporter dedicated to covering the important stories in their communities.

Markel doesn’t have an assignment editor so she’s responsible for coming up with story ideas on her own.

“People are reaching out a lot more because they are now recognizing that I am the southwest Iowa person,” she said. “I do want people to send me ideas because they’re very helpful. Once you start covering a topic, you’re more connected to people in certain organizations.

“Sometimes, it does get really hard because people have valid ideas, but I’m one person trying to cover the whole region. It’s hard when I have to tell people, ‘I just can’t get there. I can’t get to the event.’”

When Markel first took on the reporting job, she relied heavily on her Mills County connections for story ideas, but fully understood the need to expand her footprint across the southwest Iowa region.

KMTV’s coverage area in southwest Iowa extends east to Cass and Carroll Counties and north to Monona County.

Markel believes her southwest Iowa upbringing gives her some instant credibility with people who might normally be reluctant to talk to an out-of-town television reporter.

“I often lead with that when I’m calling somebody new because if they know I’m from Glenwood, they automatically almost trust me a little bit more,” she said.

Impactful Stories
In her relatively short time in the field, Markel has reported on many issues, but no story has been as impactful on the personal level for her than the tornadoes that decimated Minden and parts of Shelby County last April. Markel traveled to Minden immediately after the tornado ravaged the city and nearby farm homes.

“At first, it was just so overwhelming – the devastation,” she recalled. “That first weekend, it was really exhausting. I wasn’t directly traumatized, but I walked into town a few hours after it happened. Electricity was off and I was stumbling over rubble and using my phone for a flashlight. I hung out by the fire department and one of the striking things, I saw them put the American flag back up on the flag pole. The pole had been bent over but I just happened to be there to get footage of the fire department reraising the American flag. There’s just certain things that stick in your mind.”

Over the past 11 months, Markel has had the opportunity to return to the Minden area to report on the community’s rebuilding effort and some of the positive developments that have happened since the disaster, including the Tri-Center High School football team winning the school’s first state championship. Several players on the team were impacted directly by the tornado.

Some of the most enjoyable stories for Markel have involved getting out to rural communities to tell a story that normally wouldn’t be told by an Omaha television station, like a feature on a group of women who went pheasant hunting together.

“I grew up a tag-along with my dad out on hunting trips so to tag along with a group of women pheasant hunting was kind of fun because I hadn’t done any of that since I was kid,” she said. “I try to find some of those rural stories that aren’t necessarily getting told other places. They may be in local papers, but they’re not being told on TV.”

Last fall, Markel returned to Glenwood for a story on Homecoming. She filmed part of her story while riding on the parade float with the Class of 1994.

“It was a kind of a sequel to my very long documentary,” Markel quipped. “Jenni Rounds was sitting next to me so she got roped into it (interview). She was another speech kid so she was fine with it.”

Markel is enjoying her work and even finds some irony and humor in the fact that she’s back working in the community she didn’t fully appreciate as a child.

“The fact that I came back is almost a funny joke, right?” she said. “I was always trying to escape in some way.”

Although Markel is uncertain what the future will bring for her professionally in an industry that’s constantly evolving, for now she’s happy in her role as KMTV’s Southwest Iowa Neighborhood Reporter.

“I would like to stay in news. Maybe at some point, I might want to transition to a different role. I wouldn’t mind teaching journalism at some point, if that’s something we’re still allowed to do in the future as a job,” she said. “For now, I want to keep on doing what I’m doing. You get a chance to do positive stories about your community, sort of the friendliness, goodness and the neighborliness of people in southwest Iowa. It’s good to be reminded of that.”