Wayne Harrison came to The Denver Channel in 2001 as Senior News Editor, after an 18-year stint at KMGH TV. He lives in the mountains, between Conifer and Bailey with his wife and daughter. He first came to Colorado in 1973, before leaving a few years later then returning in 1981.
Wayne started at Denver's 7 as a news writer in 1983. Over the years, he held various positions in the KMGH newsroom including producer, senior producer, assignment editor and assignment manager.
He worked on the newsroom assignment desk during the Pope's visit to Denver, the Summit of the Eight in Denver, the Oklahoma City bombing trials, and the Columbine tragedy.
While working at 7NEWS, Wayne was named the Colorado correspondent for
States News Service, supplying state news summaries for distribution to web portals including Yahoo, Excite, Lycos and to ABC Radio News.
Wayne has been involved in broadcast journalism for over 40 years, starting in high school. As a radio reporter, he covered the first moon landing from the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston in 1969, and a number of Apollo missions that followed, for the
Texas State Radio Network. He also worked as the East Texas bureau chief for the
Shreveport Times newspaper during that period.
In 1979 he became the first broadcast journalist in Texas to be jailed for refusing to reveal a news source after he began a series of reports on a crooked East Texas sheriff, while Wayne was news director of a local radio station in Longview, Texas. The sheriff was later indicted and convicted on federal charges of racketeering and conspiracy to commit murder. Wayne received a number of awards for his investigative reporting in the case.
After several years in various positions at at KRLD NewsRadio in Dallas, Wayne left Texas to open and manage the Metro Traffic Control office in Minneapolis, Minn., and eventually transferred to manage the Denver Metro Traffic office, where he provided traffic reports for a number of Denver radio stations and for Channel 7 television. He then left radio to move to KMGH TV in 1983.
Wayne is also an online news editor for
Topix.net and an editor on the
DMOZ Open Directory Project.
He is the founder of
Pinecam.com, a popular community Web site in the mountain communities southwest of Denver and ran it until 2005, when he turned it over to a Board of Directors he appointed. He also started
285Chat.com, a social networking site for residents in the same area.
Additional Web interests include his administration of
Cavechat.org>, the official caving forum of the National Speleological Society and the founding of
OnlineCavers.com, a popular social networking site for cavers worldwide.
His daily Web site visits include
I Want Media,
Fark,
BoingBoing,
reddit,
Wired, and
CNET.
For podcasts, he's fond of the BBC Newspod, This Week In Tech (TWIT), Buzz Out Loud (BOL), and CBC's science program Quirks & Quarks.
When he's not working or on the Internet, you might finding him camping and
caving with his teenage daughter. In 2007, Wayne was honored as a Fellow of the National Speleological Society for his Internet work for the Society.
He is fond of traveling to Europe and plans to retire in a few year to the UK with his England-born wife.
Wayne is a prostate cancer survivor, having been diagnosed in early 2008 and having a radical prostatectomy a few months later.
"As I grow older and face challenges, I am reminded of a quote from a movie: 'The ox is slow, but the Earth is patient.'"
