Host of ABC-7’s Sunday night program Xtra, a weekly broadcast designed to provide viewers in-depth analysis on hot topics that airs following the 10 p.m. newscast, Darren Hunt has lived many lives as a reporter. After working for nearly two decades as a sportswriter for the El Paso Herald-Post and El Paso Times, Hunt joined ABC-7 in the middle of the station's award-winning Storm 2006 coverage. Since then, Hunt has been breaking stories, reporting the news and leading the discussions on hot topics with gusto and energy.

How long have you been in media? My first paid writing job was when I was 15. It was an El Paso sports weekly that lasted less than a year. I also wrote sports for my high school paper at Irvin as a freshman, but my sophomore through senior year I played basketball. Funny story, that's how I first met Newspaper Tree editor Sito Negron, playing pick-up basketball as a teenager at Memorial Gym. At UTEP, I decided the best way to stay close to sports, since my playing days were clearly over, was to study sports media.

Where did you start? While attending UTEP and writing for The Prospector, I answered an ad on the job wall at the Union for a high school sports reporter position at the El Paso Herald-Post (1988, I think). El Paso Times editorial writer Joe Muench was the sports editor at the HP. He's the guy who taught me what a story is. I thank Joe for that. I spent nine years under him at the HP, then moved on to the Times in 1997 and took over the UTEP football and basketball beats, including the final few years of Don Haskins' career.

What do you consider your best story? That's really for others to decide. But I will tell you that one of my favorite stories was taking people inside Coach Haskins' living room on the 42nd anniversary of Texas Western's NCAA championship this past March, showing them what it would be like to watch the 1966 title game with him. It was his 78th birthday. Coach passed just six months later. I have that package on my DVR at home. I play it every once in a while when I miss hearing his voice. I think a lot of people miss that.

Is it different being a host for ABC-7 Xtra and being a reporter? How do they differ? Not too different, still using the same journalistic principles. But there is so much more time to develop a story during Xtra. It's really cool to be able to put together a four or five minute package to lead off the show, sort of like a local "Nightline." During a normal newscast, the longest package - other than during sweeps - is probably a minute and a half. It's awesome to be able to have more time once a week. I'm sure every reporter would like to have that. I take this opportunity very seriously and appreciate it. Xtra is something I think helps set ABC-7 apart and I'm very happy to be a part of it.

How do you prepare for Xtra? It must be, pun intended, quite a bit of Xtra work. Sure, it's a lot of Xtra work, but it's an opportunity I can't pass up. I do get a lot of input on topics from the newsroom. We have a great newsroom. We've assembled quite a team at ABC-7 and I can honestly say I've never looked forward to getting to work more in my life. Our strength is our reporters. I think every station knows they're only as good as the stories reporters bring to the table and then deliver. And we take "Where News Comes First" pretty seriously. That makes finding a topic interesting enough to expand into a 30-minute show quite easy, although producing Xtra does fall completely on me. I've really learned to like the editing part of the job, though, as I've gotten better at it.

Have you ever considered working in a larger market, and why have you stayed in El Paso? Sure, I've thought about it. My sister, Joy, lives in Dallas and I get there often for games. I like Dallas. But my mother and father, who I owe everything I've ever achieved, live here. I also have a beautiful fiancé, Patricia, here, my brother, Brian, and his girls ... Life is good and I love El Paso. This is an incredible news town; I think you'll agree. And working for a guy like our GM, Kevin Lovell, a former ABC-7 reporter, is not a bad thing. I've found in my career, when the boss comes from the newsroom, that's a great thing.

You were in sports, and now cover news. What are the differences, and why did you transition from sports to political and other news? That question reminds me of another funny story about Sito Negron. The first time I ever covered a news event, although I do consider sports to be news in many cases, Sito was the city editor at the Times. He sent me out to cover a SWAT standoff off of Doniphan. He told me, "I know you're a sportswriter, so here's what you do...Pretend the guy in the house is one team and the cops are the other. Tell me who wins!" I figured I could do that. There are a lot of similarities between sports and news, and if you notice, during Xtra I use a lot of sports references. Everything is a football game to me. Even a City Council meeting. Somebody wins; somebody loses. Stories really all come down to "Who, What, Where, When, Why and How?" One of the things I love about my job is that management at ABC-7, because of all the years I spent as a sportswriter, sees me as an asset when it comes to major sports stories. I still cover the Sun Bowl every year, and just covered my 20th in a row. Few stations can take a sports story and make it into a lead news story. We do that at ABC-7. And I still get to be at all the big games. I've got the best of both worlds now.

How much leeway do you have to interject your personality and viewpoints into hosting Xtra? Lots. The station has been very supportive. But I think the viewers are there to hear from the list of true El Paso characters, like a Paul Strelzin, a Sal Gomez, a Mayor Cook or a Pat Haggerty, which we deliver on Xtra. They don't care what my viewpoint is. I'm just there to ask the questions and keep things moving. I'm only as good as my guests and I appreciate people coming in and laying it on the line on Sunday nights in front of the whole city. And if they won't, we just tell everybody they wouldn't come. It's only happened a couple of times, though. I'll let you guess who.

Is there a tension between Xtra, which almost requires you to engage your subjects, and reporting? Has anyone confused the two? I engage my subjects everyday, even when doing minute and a half daily packages. You just don't see the entire 10 or 15-minute interview. You only see a couple sound bites from it. There are many other interesting moments, sitting in someone's office, asking him or her the difficult questions with just me, them and a photographer in the room. Xtra many times has become a review of my week as a reporter. It's a topic I put together a couple packages on during the week, expanded to a 30-minute show. And believe me, there's always more to talk about. Xtra gives us that opportunity and most of the feedback I've seen is along the lines of, "Hey, thanks for the additional forum to talk about important stuff in our city." I like being a part of that.

You were in print, and now report for television. What are the differences, and the similarities, and do you see the two "converging?" They already have. But television has an extremely tough learning curve and doing it right is not easy. There's so much to it and so many people involved - from reporters to anchors to photographers, editors, producers and directors...And that makes it a real team atmosphere, unlike a newspaper, where you basically do it all yourself and just make sure you e-mail it on time. That's what I like most about the change I made from print to TV - the team aspect of it and the competition with other media outlets. I guess I miss playing sports so much (every ex-high school jock does, right?); it's just nice to be on a team again and feel what it's like to win. And being on the No. 1 team in town, we win a lot. It's a great sense of daily accomplishment for me to come together with a bunch of talented people every day - many of them younger and smarter than me - and create something informative and entertaining that is not only news to our viewers, but to our competition as well.

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Editor's Note: This article was originally published in the February 2009 issue of
El Paso Magazine.

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