Vicente Arenas — the weekend news anchor and weekday reporter for KHOU Channel 11 — is leaving the Houston CBS affiliate to join the network as a national correspondent in Miami.
Arenas, who started working at KHOU in 2003, will leave in one week and will begin his new job in Miami on March 17.
He will be the first KHOU anchor to go directly to CBS News as a national correspondent since Dan Rather left the station in 1961.
"We are so proud of Vicente and so happy that he'll still be in the family, reporting to the CBS Evening News and all the network's news broadcasts," stated an internal KHOU memo, according to the Chronicle.
CBS News president David Rhodes told Broadcasting & Cable that there was a vacancy at the network's Miami bureau which CBS wanted to fill with a reporter who was fluent in Spanish.
"We wanted someone who had Spanish-language ability," Rhodes said. "That was really a prerequisite for us. It is a bilingual city and part of this for CBS is about regional coverage."
Prior to his time at KHOU, Arenas worked at WOAI in San Antonio as the weekday morning anchor and consumer reporter and at KTRK Channel 13, primarily as a crime reporter.
Arenas, who has lived in Houston since 1998, graduated from the University of Texas at Austin with a degree in journalism.
Arenas will be the first KHOU anchor to go directly to CBS News as a national correspondent since Dan Rather.
