2010 Honoree: Gene Patterson

Gene Patterson, a television news fixture in East Tennessee for more than a quarter-century, was the 2010 Front Page Follies honoree.

“Gene Patterson: a good man, a strong journalist, a laugh a minute. I’m proud to sit next to him at the anchor desk, and grateful to call him my friend,” WATE co-anchor Lori Tucker said. “But he’s terrible at Tetris.”

In addition to co-anchoring WATE-TV newscasts at 5, 6 and 11 p.m. each weekday, Patterson hosts Tennessee This Week, a weekly political affairs program that airs on Sunday mornings.

Before joining WATE-TV in 2001, Patterson was a reporter for WBIR-TV from 1980 to 1998 where he covered a variety of stories from the 1982 World’s Fair to the Butcher Banking scandal and developed a weekly feature called “Ten Country,” which centered on the unique people and places of East Tennessee. He covered Tennessee angles in presidential elections from 1984 through 1996.

Patterson spent two years as deputy to Mayor Victor Ashe, where among his projects were city regulations regarding noise and billboards and the Knoxville-Knox County Urban Growth Plan.

Patterson was raised in Madisonville, Tenn., attended Hiwassee College and now serves on the school’s Board of Trustees. He graduated from the University of Tennessee. He and his wife, Phyllis, have two daughters and three grandchildren.