A soft-spoken and seemingly ageless presence at WLS-Ch. 7, Alan Krashesky is stepping down after four decades as an anchor and reporter at the ABC-owned Chicago station.
Krashesky, 61, who co-anchors the top-rated 5, 6 and 10 p.m. newscasts, made the announcement Tuesday evening — exactly 40 years to the day he first hit the Chicago airwaves.
“It’s been a great ride,” Krashesky told viewers during the 6 p.m. newscast. “Now the time, just simply, is the right time.”
A Philadelphia native and Ithaca College graduate, Krashesky has been a mainstay at ABC 7 since joining the station as a general assignment reporter and fill-in weathercaster on Oct. 4, 1982. Krashesky hit the ground running, covering a school bus crash on his first day at the job.
The rest of week one at the station was spent covering the Tylenol murders, a series of unsolved cyanide poisonings that killed seven people in the Chicago area and created a worldwide panic.
His prodigious tenure at ABC 7 spans so long that he filed his inaugural reports in the waning days of the seminal “happy talk” anchor team of Joel Daly and Fahey Flynn, which reshaped local news and built an enduring ratings giant in Chicago television.
Krashesky has since steadily risen through the ranks, ultimately filling the role as top anchor at the station.
“When I came to Channel 7 as a 21-year-old … my goal was to be the primary news anchor at ABC 7,” Krashesky said Wednesday. “And obviously, it took decades for that to unfold.”
Relieved of his fill-in weather duties in 1984, Krashesky began doing local news segments during the daily “Good Morning America” broadcasts. In 1989, he became the first anchor of the morning newscast at ABC 7, partnering with Kathy Brock the following year. When it was all done, Krashesky would have a lengthy roster of co-anchors covering nearly every daypart at the station.
In 1994, Krashesky moved from mornings to the 5 p.m. newscast, where he co-anchored with Diann Burns. He shifted to the 6 p.m. newscast in 1998, replacing the retiring Floyd Kalber alongside Brock. When Daly retired in 2005, Krashesky added the 4 p.m. newscast to his duties, co-anchoring with Linda Yu.
Krashesky’s elevation to the coveted top job came in 2016, when he succeeded Ron Magers as co-anchor of the 10 p.m. newscast. He currently partners with Cheryl Burton on the 5 and 10 p.m. newscasts, while Judy Hsu is his co-anchor at 6 p.m.
“Alan Krashesky’s career is a template for any aspiring journalist,” John Idler, president and general manager of ABC 7 Chicago, said in a news release. “His professionalism, skill as an anchor and fairness as a reporter has earned not only countless awards but the respect of our viewers and his ABC 7 colleagues.”
While Krashesky spent nearly all of his career in Chicago, he started as a news reporter and weathercaster for brief stints at WBNG-TV in Binghamton, New York and KTBC-TV in Austin, Texas, before arriving at ABC 7 as a fresh-faced 21-year-old.
But Krashesky had a challenging path to adulthood, his life fundamentally shaped by a family tragedy that has stayed with him throughout his career, informing and imbuing his reporting with an empathy born of his own loss.
“At the age of four months, my father was murdered in a robbery in Philadelphia,” Krashesky said. “So I never knew my dad, and obviously my family, they became the victims of violent crime.”
With his mother struggling to raise four children alone, Krashesky was enrolled as a 4-year-old at the Milton Hershey School, a private Pennsylvania boarding school for orphans and impoverished children founded and endowed by the chocolate magnate.
His own experience resonates every time he reports on a crime in Chicago, Krashesky said.
“It moves me knowing the lasting impact something horrible like that has,” he said.
A number of high-profile and long-tenured Chicago news anchors have retired in recent years, including Magers, Yu, Brock and Mark Suppelsa, who “unplugged” and moved to Montana after 25 years of the daily TV news grind.
Krashesky said navigating the pandemic played a role in his decision to join them in retirement.
“Certainly the experience we’ve all gone through during the pandemic had an influence on this,” Krashesky said. “It just underlined the reality that the amount of time we have in this life is extremely precious.”
A resident of Naperville, Krashesky and his wife, Colleen, have three children, three grandchildren and remain rooted in the Chicago area. He said he has no plans to leave the area.
He also has no post-anchor plans, other than to take a “life sabbatical,” reflect on a successful career and figure out what he might do with the next chapter of his life.
“My simple answer to what I’m going to do next is, I don’t know,” Krashesky said.
Krashesky’s last day on the air is scheduled for Nov. 22. The station has not announced his successor.
