Al Joens grew up on a family farm in western Iowa. He was first bitten by the journalism bug while writing for his high school newspaper. After graduating from Buena Vista University in Storm Lake, Iowa in 1985, he went to work as a news reporter for the local radio station, KAYL. At the same time, he worked part-time as a weekend reporter at KTIV-TV in Sioux City. For nearly a year, he worked weekdays at the radio station and weekends at the TV station until he was brought on full-time at KTIV in the spring of 1986. Later that year, he was promoted to weekend anchor/producer. In 1988, he moved to the morning newscast and that’s where he’s been ever since, save for a three-year stint as evening anchor from 1999 to 2001.

Al has covered many big stories over the years, including the crash of United Airlines Flight 232 in Sioux City in 1989, Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana and Mississippi in 2005 and historic flooding in Iowa and Nebraska in 2011 and 2019. But, he most enjoys sharing stories of human interest, like the 90-year-old Iowa farmer who still uses his team of horses to plant 30 acres of soybeans each year, or the Nebraska farmer who makes boomerangs in his workshop.

Among his proudest accomplishments are the three consecutive years that News 4 Today received the Upper Midwest Emmy for Daytime Newscast and the five years in a row he was awarded 1st place for Feature Reporting from the Iowa Broadcast News Association.

Randomly: Al has ridden a bicycle across Iowa 20 times.

Also: Al met his wife, Melissa, when she was hired as a reporter at KTIV.

And: They have three grown children: Rachel, a first-grade teacher in Des Moines, Kevin, an officer with the FDIC in Michigan, and Philip, a reporter for the Des Moines Register.