It’s a new era for one Austin TV station’s sports desk.
Dennis De la Peña is no longer FOX 7’s sports director — instead, he’s made the leap to hosting the station’s digital first Austin Live shows weekdays from 11:30 to noon and from 4 to 5 p.m. The show is a mixture of “some local news, some national news, some sports and some fun,” he told MySA, marking a departure from his usual expertise.
De la Peña came to the station 27 years ago and has been sports director for 13 of them, he said. However, it was time for a change.
He told MySA the night shift has always come with work-life imbalance, but he knew “I needed to be there for my kids” amid his divorce from KXAN morning anchor Sally Hernandez. Because he was signed through June on a two-year contract, he said he thought he “was going to have to find a new career — PR, most likely — because … the only thing I knew was I couldn’t work nights anymore.”
“And our general manager [Susie Doucette-Pyle] is incredible,” he said. “She is very forward thinking, and she already has known that the future of local television is going to be digital. You know, we need to meet the viewer where they are, which is on their phone or in some form, digital streaming news, and so the timing couldn’t have been better. It didn’t take long for her to offer me this position.”
In his absence, weekend sports anchor and reporter John Hygh — who’s been on the FOX 7 sports desk since 2006 — has moved into the sports director role. Meanwhile, Clif Thornton has slid into Hygh’s former position. De la Peña says the department has been left “in great hands” and he’ll still fill in from time to time as well as producing sports specials.
“For me, moving forward, I just am hoping to help this digital push, to help us head into the future of local television in this streaming form,” he said. “It was something for an older TV guy like me to to always discount in the past, but over the last few years, it seems pretty obvious even to me that, yeah, people are taking their news in so differently now, and it’s very exciting to be a part of that evolution.”