KYUK’s 2021 honors include first place for Best Comprehensive Coverage of the COVID-19 Pandemic. KYUK received this award among all news outlets in Alaska.
If you were in the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta in the 1980s and you tuned your television to channel four, you might have seen Lillian Atmak Michael announcing the Yup’ik news. You would see her long, straight black hair parted in the middle, and her big glasses that covered nearly half of her face. What you wouldn’t see was the complex linguistic surgery she was conducting in her mind. Former KYUK news director Rhonda McBride said that Atmak would not only translate the English news into Yup’ik, but she would also completely restructure the information for a Yup’ik audience.