After a 39-year career in broadcast journalism, CBS Colorado’s Alan Gionet is retiring.
The reporter and anchor’s love of journalism showed in his daily work, and his writing style resulted in stories that would stick with you for a long time after viewing them.
“I find new things every day and truly love people, so this is a great job for me,” Gionet said.
His coworkers, many of whom have been at his side for decades, agree with that statement.
“He is like the O.G. reporter,” reporter Karen Morfitt said. “His genuineness to connect with people is unmatched.”
CBS Colorado Executive Producer of Community Impact Anna Alejo says he is “an extraordinarily gifted writer.”
“He has a mastery of language that he learned from his parents, who were teachers, and he just always has the right tone,” Alejo said.
Newscast/special projects producer Rachel Smith described Gionet’s reports as “people-focused in such an empathetic way.”
“Everything about his storytelling is so centered around viewing people as people,” she said.
“The characters that he always finds in a story, the way he writes around them and just makes it all happen is to be admired,” said newscast producer Aaron Romek.
Vice President Station Manager and News Director Kristine Strain called him “one of the best writers, best storytellers I’ve ever worked with.”
Gionet’s coworkers also say that over the years he has been a great mentor.
“Alan has always made me feel comfortable as a producer, and he’s always been willing and eager to teach and to guide,” senior newscast producer Maria Braganini said.
Former co-anchor Brooke Wagner said she views Gionet as the “template, in my opinion, for doing it all.”
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A native of Massachusetts, he met his wife of 30 years, a Denver native, after arriving in Colorado in 1994. The couple has four grown daughters. Gionet is a longtime runner and hockey player.
“He is a great girl dad, hard worker, investigative reporter, and he was always super fit and out on the ice or running the trail,” Wagner said. “And I just remember thinking, if I can keep up with that guy, I’ll be okay.”
Wagner said she “knows the community appreciates all of your work.”
Before their time together reporting in CBS Colorado’s newscasts, Gionet worked at the same television station as Political Reporter Shaun Boyd. She calls him “an extraordinary reporter, a genuine friend and a force for good in this world.”
Gionet’s career in TV started in Mississippi and moved to Michigan, where he exposed deplorable conditions in the state’s foster care system. He also reported on worker safety issues leading up to the largest workplace fine in state history at the time. After Michigan, he worked as an investigative reporter in Providence, Rhode Island, before arriving in Denver.
Many viewers of this television station will remember Gionet’s first stint here in the 1990s. He covered wildfires, including the deadly one at Storm King Mountain, in which he reported on how the firefighters failed to get proper weather information. He exposed how registered sex offenders were often not living where they showed their registered addresses. And he was the first television reporter to cover the dispute over the keeping of bodies in a shed in Nederland. Ultimately, the story went worldwide. Later, the community would use that publicity to create Frozen Dead Guy Days.
Gionet left for Jacksonville, Florida, in 1998, where he was a primary anchor and was later named nightside managing editor. Stories he covered included the 2000 national election controversy and the efforts to recover endangered right whales, which were on a path to extinction.
Gionet returned to Colorado in 2006 and has covered all of the Centennial State’s biggest stories since then. That includes environmental stories, mass shootings and COVID-19. He has always been a student of science and politics and was relied upon for the task of breaking down complicated concepts.
His work has won him numerous Heartland Regional Emmy Awards, including best anchor in 2017. Gionet said, “I will miss walking into a newsroom. Each one I’ve worked in has been filled with decent and bright people interested in serving the public. That’s both the people on the air and behind the scenes,” he explained. “I wish the public understood that better.”
He plans to get out on the trails and run and spend more time at dinners and on holidays he’s missed with his wife and daughters.
“I still have a lot of energy and good health, so I will be involved in things I care greatly about. And that list is long,” he said.
“I am lucky to have learned so much from people and their lives through my work,” he shared. “Life is a series of stories, and I have a lot of them.”
