Pat Finn

Pat Finn never thought she would end up in San Diego. But now she thinks she may never leave. Although she has retired from KPBS, she still works there 30 hours a week, producing history pieces for “Full Focus,” a daily public affairs show.

“I’m going to keep doing what I’m doing until they throw me out,” Finn says. “I’m having a great time.”

Finn started her career as a teacher in Los Angeles. She learned quickly that wasn’t what she wanted to do. Her real calling was television news, so she went to work at KTLA in Los Angeles. Recruited by KCET in 1974, she planned to stay in public television for the long haul.

Her marriage to a UCSD professor necessitated her move to San Diego in 1979, and she went to KPBS.

Finn says of her first few years here, “I thought it was very insular, very small-minded.” But the city grew on her, and it got more diverse. She gives much of the credit for that to Pete Wilson, former mayor. “He was a very strong mayor at a time when we had the city council/city manager form of government. San Diego looks like it does because of him” she says.

Perhaps the biggest change Finn has witnessed in the public television industry in the last three decades “is the proliferation of ways to get information. It is astonishing,” she says. Media conglomerates and the number of broadcast television stations are changes that have made Finn’s job more difficult.

“Oddly enough,” she says, “I think the future of public television is in local programming. I think public television in general spent the last six years trying to be all things to all people. And I don’t think we can do that anymore.”

Finn is a member of the Torrey Pines community planning board, a new member of Malashock Dance company board and was a 1987 TWIN recipient.

— Alexis Pasqua