Luke Cleary – Reporter, Weekend Anchor – ABC10 Sacramento, CA (DMA #20)
Luke Cleary is an Emmy-nominated journalist who is passionate about breaking news and visual storytelling with 15 years of experience as a reporter and anchor in California, the Midwest, and South Korea, including nine years at the Korean Broadcasting System in Seoul (2009-2018).(continued below)
An active member of the AAJA and NPPA with MMJ skills and a drone pilot certification, he is currently the weekend anchor and a nightside reporter at ABC10-Sacramento (DMA #20). He can also speak conversational Korean and cook a mean kimchi-jjigae.
Since joining ABC10 in 2021, Luke has covered major California wildfires, the deadly K Street shoot-out, and severe winter storms in Sacramento and Sierra foothill communities. He was nominated for an NATAS SF/NorCal Regional Emmy for his August 2021 coverage of the Caldor Fire burning near Lake Tahoe, and again in 2023 for his daily news reporting.
Luke’s natural disaster coverage was recognized by TEGNA corporate leaders; he was tapped by sister stations KUSA-Denver to cover the Marshall Fire in the winter of 2021-22, and WTLV-Jacksonville to cover Hurricane Nicole in Fall 2022.
Luke has attended multiple visual storytelling workshops over the last several years, including the NPPA News Video Workshop in Norman, OK (March, 2024) and Advanced Storytelling Workshop (October, 2021).
Previously, he worked as a Weekend Anchor and Multi-Skilled Journalist at WQAD in Moline, Ill., covering important stories in the Quad Cities on the Illinois-Iowa border, including the historic 2019 Mississippi River flooding in Davenport and surrounding cities, the 2020 presidential campaign and Iowa Caucuses, and the summer 2020 derecho windstorm and following days of power outages.
Luke grew up in Chenoa, Ill., and is a 2009 graduate of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he earned a degree in broadcast journalism.
From 2009 to 2018, Luke was a TV and radio host in Seoul, South Korea, primarily for the Korean Broadcasting System (KBS). Beginning in 2013, Luke was the main anchor of News Today on KBS World TV for five years. He is an active member of the Asian American Journalists Association.
In Korea, he covered such stories as the 2014 Sewol ferry disaster, the 2016-17 mass democratic protests and impeachment of former South Korean President Park Geun-hye, and the historic 2018 inter-Korean meeting between North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un and South Korean President Moon Jae-in.
Luke Cleary 