Matt Frei

Matthias "Matt" Frei (born 26 November 1963) is a British-German television news journalist and writer, formerly the Washington, D.C. correspondent for ''Channel 4 News''. He is now the channel's Europe editor and presenter of the evening news.

Personal life

Frei was born in 1963 in Essen, West Germany. His parents left Silesia before it became part of Poland, and settled in Germany.First Person, 17 January 2009
''The Guardian''. Retrieved on 24 November 2009. In 1973, Frei and his family left Germany and moved to the United Kingdom, where his father became a London correspondent for Deutschlandfunk.

Frei was educated at Westminster School, then read history and Spanish at St Peter's College, University of Oxford, before graduating in 1986.

Frei lives in London with his wife Penny and their four children.

Career

BBC

Frei joined the BBC and spent a year in the German section of the World Service, before he moved to English language current affairs, where he worked for another year.

In 1989, working as a stringer, he reported on the First Intifada in Jerusalem, then on the Persian Gulf War as London foreign affairs correspondent. He took up the post of Bonn correspondent in Germany on the same day as the fall of the Berlin Wall.

In 1990, Frei took a holiday in Zimbabwe and persuaded aid worker friend Katty Kay to become a journalist.

From 1992 to 1996, he worked as a Southern Europe correspondent, based in Rome, and covered events in Bosnia, Kosovo, North Africa and various Mafia-related stories.

After working as a Southern Europe correspondent, he worked as an Asia correspondent from 1997 to 2003, based in Hong Kong (taking up his post just before the handover to China) and later in Singapore.

From 2002, he was the BBC's Washington, DC correspondent. In 2005, Frei reported from the centre of New Orleans