An Emmy and Murrow Award-winning journalist, Michael anchors Channel 2 News Midday. He also reports and anchors for other 2 On Your Side newscasts and serves as managing editor for the news department.
Michael is from a small town in West Virginia. He attended Marshall University (GO HERD!) on the prestigious Yeager Scholarship. He graduated Summa Cum Laude with Honors, earning a degree in Broadcast Journalism. Michael also studied at Oxford University in Britain and at Universidad Antonio de Nebrija in Madrid, Spain.
Michael's first job was at the powerhouse NBC station WSAZ-TV, where he started as a producer before becoming a reporter and finally weekend evening anchor.
His most memorable story there was interviewing then-Senators Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton on the same day. Michael was the station's political reporter, so he interviewed dozens of national politicians during the 2008 campaign.
Michael moved to Buffalo just before the 2009 crash of Continental Flight 3407. It was the first story he covered in Western New York. In the couple of years that followed, he had the privilege of reporting on the families' multiple journeys to Washington, D.C., where they fought for better airline regulation to prevent another tragedy.
In July 2012, Michael reported from Aurora, Colorado, where a gunman killed 12 people and hurt dozens of others inside a movie theater. Michael did dozens of live reports for Gannett sister stations across the country. He also reported from Chardon, Ohio after the school shooting there, from Little Rock, Arkansas following a hurricane, from the Denver area for flooding in 2013, and from Washington, D.C. during "Snowmageddon" in 2010.
Michael and Photojournalist Terry Belke won an Emmy Award for their story about hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. Michael has been nominated for three other Emmy awards, as well as multiple Associated Press awards. He won 1st place for Best Enterprise Reporting at the 2013 AP awards. In 2015, Michael Wooten a regional Edward R. Murrow award for best investigative reporting for his series on "Cell Phone Spying" at the Erie County Sheriff's Office.
Michael lives in Buffalo near Downtown. He's a Bills fan as long as they aren't playing the Redskins! He's a Sabres fan, too! Michael loves WNY summers and traveling this beautiful region.
If you have a story idea, contact Michael at Michael.Wooten@wgrz.com, follow him on Twitter @wgrzmichael, and his Facebook is facebook.com/michael.wootenwgrz
