Helping women and minorities into newsrooms since 1993
Helping women and minorities into newsrooms since 1993
A day before The Athletic’s Las Vegas Raiders beat writer and SJI alum Tashan Reed was officially named as the 2023 winner of the Terez A. Paylor Emerging Writer Award by the PFWA, Reed’s friends and colleagues organized a surprise call to congratulate him.
“You’re the gold standard for writers in their twenties and for beat writers period,” Creighton beat reporter and SJI alum Joel Lorenzi told Reed during the surprise.
The yearly honor is given to an NFL beat writer under 30 that best maintains the legacy of former Yahoo! Sports and Kansas City Star reporter Terez A. Paylor, who passed away in February 2021 at 37. Paylor graduated from Howard in 2006 and joined the Kansas City Chiefs beat in 2013 before eventually covering the NFL nationally for Yahoo! Sports.
“He was really an inspiration for me as I was cutting my teeth and learning the basics of the business,” Reed said about Paylor. “I was lucky enough to meet him and get to know him and consider him a friend and a mentor before he passed.”
Reed is the third recipient of the award and the first Black male to receive the honor. In 2021, Jourdan Rodrigue of The Athletic won the first award, followed by Jori Epstein of USA Today in 2022.
Throughout his career, Paylor demonstrated hard work, professionalism, and dedication to diversity in the NFL media. Reed has the same devotion to diversity, contributing to the initiatives at The Athletic.
“We have employee resource groups, and I helped get those off the ground in 2019. I helped create one alongside a couple of other colleagues advocating for Black people at The Athletic. That included meeting with executives and editors, a bunch of planning, and helping launch our DEI program,” Reed said.
Before covering the Raiders, he covered the Florida State Seminoles for The Athletic. Reed is an SJI 2018 class member and interned for the Memphis Commercial Appeal through the program. While he received a top-tier journalism education at the University of Missouri from 2014-2018, Reed credits SJI with helping him find other journalists to whom he could relate.
“There aren’t many of us in terms of diverse journalists, and so just having that collection of people that look like you or have similar experiences is invaluable,” he said about his initial SJI experience.
Reed, also a member of NABJ, continues to push for more diversity by continuing his efforts at The Athletic and staying involved with SJI and NABJ.
“I’m happy that I can be part of continuing to carry on his legacy with what this award stands for,” Reed said about winning the Perez A. Taylor Award. “This award stands for not just doing your job well but also trying to carry the torch in terms of pushing for diversity within the world of sports and within the world of journalism.”