Nexstar Media Group has appointed Akemi Harrison to serve as the News Director of its Chicago-area CW Network affiliate, starting later this month.
Harrison will join WGN-TV (Channel 9) on August 25, where she will take on the title of Director of News and Multiplatform Content, the broadcaster affirmed on Tuesday. In that role, she will oversee all news-related content on WGN’s broadcast signal and its digital platforms, including its streaming app WGN Plus (WGN+) and its mobile app.
“As media consumption continues to evolve into a multiplatform experience, we are thrilled to have Akemi Harrison join and lead our WGN content team,” said WGN-TV Vice President and General Manager Ric Harris. “Akemi is a highly accomplished news and media executive who understands the importance of compelling storytelling and engaging audiences across all platforms.”
Harrison joins WGN-TV from cross-town rival WMAQ (Channel 5, NBC), where she served in a similar capacity. Her career started in the mid-2000s at WAPT (Channel 16, ABC) in Jackson, Mississippi, where she spent more than two years as a newscast producer.
Joining WGN-TV is something of a return to the Nexstar family: She went from Mississippi to Northern California in 2011, joining KTXL (Channel 40, Fox) in Sacramento, where she worked as a full-time newscast producer for more than a year. At the time, KTXL and WGN-TV were both owned by Tribune Media; Nexstar acquired both stations through its purchase of Tribune in 2019.
Her time at KTXL was short-lived: Down the road from the station, a greater opportunity opened up at KXTV (Channel 10, ABC), where she was promoted to Executive Producer after spending a year there. She helped the station work through its rebranding from “News10” to “ABC10” and achieved the station’s first top newscast among a key demographic of viewers.
In 2015, Harrison joined KTVU (Channel 2, Fox) in Oakland, which serves the greater San Francisco Bay Area. She worked as the news producer for the station’s morning show, the highest-rated news program in the market. She also co-created a new weekly lifestyle show called “Bay Area People.”
The East Coast came calling in 2016, when Harrison left the foggy Bay Area for the overcast skies of Pittsburgh, a market with cloudy weather two-thirds out of the year. She joined WPXI (Channel 11, NBC), one of the top-performing stations in the market, where she launched a new program called “Megaphone” that added live, interactive elements to the station’s newscast. The program eventually served as a blueprint for similar programming that rolled out across Cox Media Group.
In 2019, she joined NBC Universal, helping to oversee news content at WVIT (Channel 30) before moving to WMAQ two years later. She joined WMAQ as an assistant news director, then transitioned into the role of interim news director in January 2023 before being promoted to the role on a full-time basis after just four months.
Now, she will work her magic at WGN-TV, one of the strongest stations in Nexstar’s local TV portfolio.
“I’m thrilled to join such an incredible team of journalists who have led the market in both ratings and community engagement for decades. Growing up in Mississippi, I watched WGN and never imagined I’d one day be in a leadership role there,” Harrison said in a statement. “My leadership philosophy is simple: support our incredible talent and dare to innovate. It’s an honor to build on WGN’s powerful legacy, and I’m excited to weave in a future-forward approach to ensure we continue to dominate the market.”
