Posted by Bud on March 25, 2010 at 17:35:22:
WGN-Ch. 9 reporter Antwan Lewis is leaving to join a network-owned-and-operated broadcast station in New York not yet identified.
Details of Lewis' new job are still being finalized with a formal announcement expected next week, he said Thursday as he packed up his things at Channel 9, Chicago Tribune parent Tribune Co.'s TV flagship.
Lewis (pictured right), who's set to turn 39 on Friday, arrived at the Chicago Tribune parent Tribune Co. flagship station from Phoenix's KTVK-TV exactly three years earlier.
"New York's always been a goal, since college, but what I didn't expect was how fond I would grow of Chicago even if it was just three years," Lewis said. "It kind of snuck up on me.
"I wouldn't have left Phoenix if I didn't think I could manage my life in the next city, but it's not like I thought I would stay for a while and then just go," he said."I didn't realize I would fall in love with the city and the people and particularly WGN, which I grew up watching on cable. To be sitting next to Allison Payne and Tom Skilling and Steve Sanders was kind of freaky for me when I first got here."
Originally from Suffolk, Va., Lewis earned a graduate degree from Regent University in Virginia Beach, Va., and an undergraduate degree from Norfolk (Va.) State University. His TV career began when he parlayed a student internship into a reporting job at Norfolk's WTKR-TV, which he left for KTVK in 2003.
Among Lewis' duties at WGN, he has been lead reporter of Channel 9 news' continuing "Fugitive Hunters" series since January 2008. He was the correspondent the station sent to Copenhagen to cover last fall's International Olympics Committee vote to reject Chicago as host city for the 2016 Summer Games.