Austin360 blogs > TV Blog > Archives > 2010 > March > 01 > Entry
Reporter/anchor Matt Flener leaving KXAN
KXAN reporter and anchor Matt Flener is leaving Austin for Denver’s KUSA.
“It’s so good to finally be able to announce it,” said Flener, who came to Austin in May, 2007. “It’s a station that I’ve had my eye on ever since I started doing broadcast journalism. It’s one of those stations that has just a huge legacy of great storytelling. It’s a once in a lifetime opportunity to even have the chance to work there. I’m just ecstatic about it.”
During his tenure at KXAN, Flener covered big stories including Hurricane Ike and last week’s Echelon building plane crash (Flener’s reports from the site were picked up by MSNBC, resulting in a pat on the back from his future employers at KUSA).
“It’s one of those stories where you’re standing in the news room and you get the call and you just go,” he said. Flener did 15-20 live shots that day, just describing what he saw, which was not as tragic as he’d assumed on the drive up. “I went on that turn ramp from Mo-Pac to 183 and I looked at that building and I said, ‘there have to be dozens of bodies in that building’.” Fortunately it didn’t turn out that way.
Flener said that the story — “one of those that you’ll remember forever” — really helped boost his confidence in his live reporting skills. But he also enjoyed reporting the smaller stories featuring those who he said “don’t always make it onto TV.”
He remembers one in particular: After receiving a tip from the person who helped him locate his first apartment in Austin, Flener arrived on the scene to find a cat that had been stuck in a drain for three days. “We went live at noon,” he recalled. “All of the other stations showed up after they saw the report at noon and then the fire department showed up — they had almost given up on rescuing this cat” (part of the story can be viewed in Flener’s resume reel, embedded below).
Flener imagines he’ll be covering the same kinds of stories he covered in Austin utilizing a variety of emerging technologies. “I’ll be shooting and editing and writing an tweeting and Flip camera-ing and all kinds of different stuff, trying to tell the story on as many different platforms as possible,” he said.
He claimed that his wife is even more excited about the prospect of heading off to Colorado with their two girls, who will turn 4 and 2 next month, than he is. When I suggested that they won’t remember Austin, he said, “I hope they do because … it’s a magical city. I’ve had the best experience here in Austin, getting to know people; getting invited into their homes.”
Flener will leave your homes in May and begin his new job in June.
Watch Flener in action:
Matt Flener Resume Reel from Matt Flener on Vimeo.
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