Front and Center

As president and owner of Montclair Communications, Lara Kunkler isn't gathering stories on the front lines of local news anymore. But at the end of each hectic day, the woman who holds the broadcast license and manages operations at WZVN/ABC-7 feels more deeply embedded in the communities her television station serves.

"It's been a blur ever since I came here," says Kunkler, 35, who moved to Southwest Florida in 1991. "I always thought I'd spend a couple years here, then go back to New England, but this is a true community. I work with passionate, energized people who care about the area and who always want to do better the next day. Through that, there's a neat passing of energy."

The Massachusetts native has been plugged into this area's unique energy since landing an internship in news production at WBBH/NBC-2. Growing up, Kunkler lived just down the street from Bernard Waterman, a close family friend whose company, Waterman Broadcasting, owns WBBH. Waterman nurtured Kunkler's early interest in news by critiquing her writing, teaching her the basic tenets of journalism and helping her find the internship while she was attending Yale University.

"When I first trained her, she was working summers as an intern and didn't really know what she wanted to be," says Chere Avery, a former news director and anchor at WBBH. "But even being the goddaughter of the owner, she worked overnight shifts and wouldn't balk at any task. If she was going to learn the ropes, the business, she was going to do it from the ground up."

Once she finished college, Kunkler took her first full-time job as a news producer at WBBH in 1991. She soon earned promotions to news operations manager and then station manager before establishing her own company and buying the ABC broadcast license from Ellis Communications in 1996. Only 26 years old at the time, she took a calculated risk just as her career was taking off.

"It was a huge leap of faith when the opportunity arose," says Kunkler. "But knowing the values and support of the close partner I had in Waterman Broadcasting, I felt I could make a major contribution."

Today, Kunkler's relationship with Waterman Broadcasting continues in the form of a local marketing agreement. Both WZVN and WBBH operate from the same building on Central Avenue in Fort Myers, an arrangement that allows the stations to share news-gathering resources, including equipment and some staff. The challenge, says Kunkler, is to make sure each station offers diverse programming that serves its particular audience.

"For NBC-2 and ABC-7, the raw material we gather-local news-is similar, but our feeling is you can provide two very different products. The key to making it work is to let on-air journalists, news producers and managers do their jobs," says Kunkler.

"There has to be a clear differentiation between management and news," she says. "I let the news people make most of the day-to-day decisions, while I concentrate on strategy, deciding what each station should be. We have what we call cooperative competition. Reporters will always compete to have that lead story or to stand out, but we've also got good team spirit."

That team spirit paid off for local residents during Hurricane Charley, when ABC-7 and NBC-2 combined resources to provide around-the-clock coverage of the storm.

Helping coordinate efforts at competing broadcast affiliates is only part of the balancing act Kunkler performs each day. She and husband Michael Reilly, a vice president at Waterman Broadcasting, have four children, all under the age of eight.

Kunkler has also become one of the area's most visible executives when it comes to contributing to charitable causes. "She's always wanted a large family because of her caring nature," says Avery, "and I think that nature ties in with her community work now. She's tireless and full of energy with great ideas. She has become a

tremendous leader."

Kunkler serves in local leadership positions for several organizations, including the United Way, the Salvation Army, the American Heart Association's Lee County Heart Ball and the Lee County Sheriff's Do the Right

Thing program.

Last spring, Governor Jeb Bush appointed her to the board of the Early Learning Coalition of Southwest Florida, a group that coordinates voluntary education programs for pre-kindergarten children.

"Being an appointee has been a very interesting experience for me, though it's still relatively new and I'm just starting to understand my role," says Kunkler. "As I have more children, I keep promising to pare back on these things, but they're all rewarding and seem to add to everything. It's important to teach my own children that it's not just work and family, it's

community too."