Fox 40’s Lonnie Wong retires from Sacramento news station after nearly 42 years

Forty-one years, six months, 28 days.

KTXL Fox 40’s Lonnie Wong is retiring after nearly 42 years at the Sacramento TV news station and a career in journalism spanning almost 50 years.

In an on-air send-off last week on Wong’s last day, fellow Fox 40 news anchors Nikki Laurenzo and Eric Harryman lauded his decades of service in Northern California news.

“He has been a huge part of the Fox 40 family, obviously, for four decades,” Harryman said.

The veteran reporter has covered stories that have shaped both local and national history, from an attempted assassination of President Gerald Ford, to the trial of Theodore Kaczynski, better known as the Unabomber, and even the first Sacramento Kings basketball game at Arco Arena in 1985, according to Fox 40.

Last year, Wong was inducted into the Silver Circle by the Northern California chapter of the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences — the organization responsible for awarding Emmys to professionals in the television industry — for his lifetime achievement in broadcast news and contribution to the community.

The Sacramento Press Club last year named a scholarship after Wong in honor of his many years of service in local news. But his work in the community has not been exclusive to the newsroom. He co-founded the Sacramento Chapter of the Asian American Journalists’ Association and has served on its board since its inception, and also helped to found the Chinese American Council of Sacramento.

In 2016, the local AAJA chapter lauded Wong as an “unsung hero in the community” and praised his commitment to “ethics, accuracy, and fair representation of all communities.”

Wong told The Sacramento Bee that being in the public eye as a TV journalist meant that he had the opportunity to “give a bigger voice” to the Asian American community, which took notice of him as he became a Sacramento staple in a field that has been historically lacking in diversity. He said being able to watch student journalists he mentored through AAJA go on to work at big networks “has been gratifying.”

The Sacramento native, who attended C.K. McClatchy High School and Sacramento City College, started his career in journalism while he was studying English at the University of California, Davis.

He was a reporter at KDVS, the university’s student-run radio station, a job that would launch a career that he had never really intended to begin.

“I just happened to fall in with some guys who were interested in radio news,” Wong said. At the time, the Watergate scandal was unfolding in Washington, and journalists seemed to be heroes, uncovering corruption at the highest levels of government.

That lofty ideal was appealing, but Wong said the real draw to journalism was the sheer fun of it. He was one of the few reporters at the time who covered Davis City Council meetings, and became a source for news in the community, even as a student reporter.

He moved on to political coverage at the California state Capitol for Bay Area radio stations while Ronald Reagan was still in office as governor. He also worked as a freelance journalist for news networks and news stations in Los Angeles and San Diego before being hired on in Sacramento.

He joined KTXL in 1980, at a time before the station’s Fox network affiliation, when the channel was known simply as TV-40. Over the years, Wong has covered seven California governors — including both of Jerry Brown’s incumbencies — from Reagan to current Gov. Gavin Newsom.

Working at KTXL, he was suddenly in front of a camera for the first time.

“It was very different,” Wong said. “You just had to learn on the fly.”

After covering national stories for big networks, he also had to adjust to the kind of coverage you might expect of a local news station.

“All of a sudden I was covering the birth of a tiger cub at the zoo,” he said.

But he did work on big stories, too. The 1994 Northridge Earthquake sticks out as a particularly big story — so big, in fact, that Wong said it was “too big for TV.” He remembered driving through the wreckage for miles and witnessing untold devastation that would never make it to air.

Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg appeared in Fox 40’s on-air segment announcing Wong’s retirement to pay respects to his work as a journalist in the community. Wong has been covering Steinberg since his first stint at Sacramento City Hall in the 1990s, when he was the city’s District 6 representative.

“I think the highest compliment that an elected official could pay to a journalist is not that they were nice — though Lonnie always was nice — but that he was always thorough and fair,” Steinberg told Fox 40. “That’s Lonnie Wong’s reputation, and it’s been deserved.”

Wong said his guiding principle in covering Sacramento news has been staying objective and letting the viewers decide for themselves how to feel about a story. That’s a tall order when TV reporters don’t have long to present their news segments to viewers at home.

“You present the things that you have gathered but you let the viewers make up their mind,” Wong said.

In an industry where high churn is the norm, Wong stayed in Sacramento primarily so he wouldn’t have to drag his family across the country — a common inconvenience for on-air talent.

“My family has always been here,” he said.

As a result, people around town have grown familiar with him, and recognize him in public as often as a few times a week.

Wong, speaking live from the Fox 40 studio on his last day, remembered his long career in journalism as a “fun ride” that gradually developed into something bigger.

“You get to go behind the yellow tape, talk to celebrities, and it was fun,” he said on-air. “The longer you do it, all the other stuff comes along: connecting with the community, covering big stories that matter to a lot of people, changing the way things are done.”

All told, Wong estimated on-air that he’s filed 10,000 stories over the course of his career at Fox 40 — “which is a lot,” he said.

At the end of the station’s segment honoring Wong, anchor Nikki Laurenzo presented a plaque to Wong, naming the station’s newsroom in his honor.

Wong said that he has no intentions of working in his retirement, and plans on traveling and enjoying his hobbies. He said he would have retired sooner, but the coronavirus pandemic nixed his travel plans last year. Now, as his career ends, Wong said he has been honored to record so much of this area’s history.

“What happened 30 years ago and 40 years ago is in the history books,” he said. “I was able to witness so many things, good and bad.”