SJI Alum Reed Looks For New Opportunity Following Washington Post Purge

Tashan Reed (Class of 2018) has always been creative. Maybe it was his love of literature or reading, or the fact that sports had always interested him, but he soon found his passion for journalism. 

“It wasn’t until around my junior (or) senior year of high school that I decided journalism was going to be what I pursued, and specifically sports journalism,” Reed said. “It was something that I felt I would be passionate about, which was important to me.”

His time at the University of Missouri allowed him to grow as a writer and journalist; it was there that he learned that sports are more than just the games played on the field. 

“I came to realize sports journalism isn’t just about the games that are being played, but there are a lot of topics that you can cover while covering sports that are adjacent to the game itself, whether it be issues of race, gender, sexual orientation, or other forms of activism, or human interest stories that you tell along the way,” Reed said. 

Throughout his career, Reed has examined and reported on the intersection of race, sports, and other social issues within sports. With that reporting, there can sometimes be blowback, but Reed said that readers are often conscious of the facts being presented to them. 

“You have to make sure that whatever you’re saying is rooted in fact, and that you have tangible facts that you can point to, to support your art,” Reed said. “That could be statistics, it could be things that happen in history, things that happened today. You just want to make sure that you do your due diligence, gathering the objective facts to support whatever subjective statement you’re making for your work.” 

Reed has had a very successful career in the field, working for the Columbia Missourian, The Athletic, and The Washington Post. He began his career with SJI at Mizzou. He was part of a Walter Williams interest group, a program that paired him with a faculty mentor in the journalism department throughout his first year. He had the opportunity to meet Leon Carter, a founder of SJI, in his first year of college at Mizzou, which put the organization on his radar. 

“I started to see people that were around my age went through SJI (and) went on to do pretty big things, which I think also showed me how quickly the organization could help springboard your career,” Reed said. “This is an organization that, if you get in there, it is pretty much a head start.” 

After the Post announced the elimination of its sports department in February, Reed was laid off. However, he is still working in sports media. 

“I will still be in the sports journalism business for sure, exactly where and when we will see,” Reed said. “I got some irons in the fire, luckily, and I am confident something will work out here soon.”