Ken Screven Cause Of Death, Obituary Not Yet Available – Ken Screven, the first Black reporter hired by a Capital Region television station and a revered figure in television news for more than three decades before spending the years since his retirement denouncing racism, bias, and bigotry in all of its forms, died Wednesday afternoon in a hospital after a long battle with multiple health issues. He was 71.
According to timesunion.com, Most people know him from his time as a reporter at CBS6/WRGB, where he was an award-winning journalist from 1977 until his retirement in 2011.
Screven had a broad appeal, thanks to his basso profundo voice, roaring laugh, joyously wicked sense of humor, and readiness to passionately fight with political opponents that was only surpassed by his vast capacity for friendship and empathy.
“Ken lived out loud, and it made us all better because of it,” said Benita Zahn, who worked in local television news with Screven from 1979 through his retirement at WNYT.
Others were proud to have him as a visible part of the LGBTQ community, something he never tried to hide despite his high profile. Even more people knew Screven from his active social life, which included bars before he became sober in the early 1990s, restaurants, cultural events, and, when he couldn’t go out, his posts on Facebook and elsewhere online.
Screven covered five New York governors, four Albany mayors, dozens of other Capital Region mayors, and scores of high-profile criminal cases and trials over his career. One of them was Christopher Porco, a Delmar college student who was convicted of an ax attack in 2004 that left his mother disfigured and his father dead.
The case drew so much attention that the Albany County district attorney’s office built up what was supposed to be a hidden, off-site office dedicated to it before the trial was shifted to Orange County.
