We are hosting a special edition of the #NYTReadalong this week. We will be celebrating The New York Times Sports Desk with an all-star lineup of Lawrie Mifflin, Claire Smith and George Vecsey. The New York Times announced last week that they were ‘disbanding’ the sports desk. Sree Sreenivasan will serve as the host.
Lawrie Mifflin
Lawrie Mifflin had a thirty-year career at The New York Times, working as a sportswriter and deputy sports editor early in her career. She is now the Executive Editor of The Hechinger Report. At The Times, she also served as a National Desk editor, a business reporter, executive director of television programming, and the co-creator of the paper's first web video department. In her role with the Television Enterprise Department, she supervised the production of documentaries based on Times reporting and oversaw all content for the Discovery Times Channel digital cable network, a joint venture of The Times and Discovery Communications.
Claire Smith
Claire Smith was the first national baseball columnist at The New York Times writing for them from 1990 to 1998. She is the founding executive editor of the Claire Smith Center for Sports Media at Temple’s Lew Klein College of Media and Communication. the first woman inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame's writers wing when she was elected the 2017 winner of the J.G. Taylor Spink Award by the Baseball Writers' Association of America (BBWAA). She was the first female to cover a major-league baseball beat full-time, covering the New York Yankees for the Hartford Courant from 1985 to 1990.
George Vecsey
George Vecsey wrote the Sports of the Times column for The New York Times from 1982 through the end of 2011. In 1968, George was hired by the Times, first covering sports, but in 1970 he was recruited to become a national correspondent in Appalachia for the Times, based in Louisville, Kentucky. Upon returning to New York, he was a Metro reporter from 1973-76. For the next four years, he covered religion, including Pope John Paul II's first trips to Mexico and the United States, and the Dalai Lama’s first trip to the United States. He returned to the Sports Desk in 1980. He maintains a blog at georgevecsey.com.
William C. Rhoden
Bill Rhoden joined The New York Times in 1982 as an editor in the Week-In-Review section. A year later, he joined the sports department reporting on high school and college sports. He was the Sports of The Times Columnist for 26 years, from 1990-2016. He currently writes for Andscape, formerly called The Undefeated.
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Thank you to MuckRack for your support of Sree's Sunday #NYTReadalong.