REID REALIZES CAREER DREAM
The MSNBC host of ‘AM Joy’ and former Miami Radio One producer and Miami Herald political columnist will be the first Black woman to host a prime-time talk show on a major network when her show, ‘The ReidOut,’ premieres,
Joy Reid, MSNBC host of ‘AM Joy’ and former Miami Radio One producer and Miami Herald columnist, will be the first Black woman to host a prime-time talk show on a major network.
Fifteen years ago, former Miami Radio One producer and Miami Herald political columnist Joy Reid made a dream board with her two greatest aspirations: Write a best-selling book and be invited as a guest on the MSNBC political talk show, “Hardball with Chris Matthews.”
Three books and several promotions later, Reid is on her way to take over Matthews’ 7 p.m. weeknight slot and become the first Black woman to host a prime-time talk show on a major network when her show, “The ReidOut,” premieres Monday on MSNBC.
“Surprise! There will be a Black lady in prime time,” Reid told theGrio.com, where she served as managing editor from 2011 to 2014, after the news broke.
Reid replaces Matthews, who resigned in March amid on-air gaffes and allegations of sexual misconduct in the newsroom. “Hardball” had been on the air since 1997.
Originally from New York, the 51-yearold mother of two built a community of fans in South Florida — where she lived for 14 years from 1997 to 2011 and held multiple media positions, including co-host of the morning radio show, “Wake Up South Florida” and press secretary for the Obama campaign in South Florida.
After graduating from Harvard University with a concentration in documentary film, Reid left a business consulting firm in New York in the late ’90s to move to Miami and pursue her longtime passions for news and reporting.
“It was literally a career changer for me,” Reid told the Herald in 2016, when MCCJ, formerly the Miami branch of the National Conference of Christians and Jews, awarded her the Hank Meyer National Headliner accolade for promoting religious tolerance and creating a safe haven for dialogue.
“I had two small kids. I was kind of starting over and reinventing myself. I’ve been a news junkie since I was a kid and had always been interested in it,” Reid said at the time.
Working as a Black journalist in South Florida, she learned how to get her voice heard, she told the Herald Friday.
“As a Black journalist, you always face the challenge of not having a lot of people like you in the media business. I was very lucky,” Reid said. “To the Black journalists out there, speak up, make your voices heard and don’t be afraid to be the only ones because sometimes one person can pull everyone through.”
She launched her journalistic career in South Florida after meeting with the-then host of “Wake Up South Florida,” James Thomas, at a local Starbucks. He hired her as the show’s co-host.
“South Florida influenced my career in every way,” Reid said. “It was only after that that I wound up working for the Obama campaign ... and then MSNBC.”
She also worked as a writer for a WSVN Channel 7 morning show, on which she was paid $7.50 an hour, the Herald reported.
RT America host Rick Sanchez, who used to work with Reid at WSVN in the early 2000s, said he remained friends with her over the years and congratulated her on her new show.
“I am so happy for her. She is exactly the kind of voice that is needed in the American media landscape right now because for too long people have been listening to a sameness in the media, especially in television journalism, and she reflects … more accurately what America looks like,” Sanchez said.
Reid first joined MSNBC as a contributor in 2011 and in 2014 took on her first show, “The Reid Report” — a weekday political commentary that took its name from her former blog — while freelancing as a political columnist for the Miami Herald’s editorial pages.
Through her Herald columns, Reid fought to protect North Miami’s cultural treasures when a dispute between the Museum of Contemporary Art and the city threatened to shut down the museum in 2014, advocated against voter suppression in local elections, and shared personal perspectives on police brutality after 18-year-old Michael Brown was fatally shot by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri.
“For millions of Americans who happen to be black or brown, that core bond of trust with the government that governs closest to you, is too often broken,” Reid wrote in a 2014 Herald column.
The Herald’s longtime editorial page editor, Nancy Ancrum, said she never met Reid personally but could tell she had character from her “muscular” columns.
“Her voice and her vision were both very astute. Her views were very well presented and very dead-on — well, if you agreed with her,” Ancrum said with a laugh.
Reid’s columns also have been published in The New York Times, The Daily Beast, New York magazine, The Guardian, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel and the South Florida Times.
Shortly after leaving the Herald in January 2015, Reid worked for the Obama campaign and authored the first of three books, “Fracture: Barack Obama, the Clintons and the Racial Divide,” in which she examined the relationships between Obama and the Clintons and racial tensions leading up to the 2016 presidential election.
The news anchor continued to climb the broadcast ladder, and in 2016 she took on her second show on MSNBC, “AM Joy.”
The morning show was live for the last time on Saturday.
In New York, Reid also mentored students at Syracuse University, where she taught a class on race, gender and the media and urged aspiring journalists to seek out truths and report them fairly.
“If we’re going to safeguard our future for the next generation of students, we actually have to develop a little more backbone about finding a real fact, being fair about trying to find it, and then being emphatic that a fact’s a fact,” she told the university after taking the faculty position in 2017.
That year, Reid came under fire when anti-gay statements written a decade earlier on her blog — including claims that then-Florida Gov. Charlie Crist was gay — resurfaced.
After failing to prove that she hadn’t written the posts herself and that the blog had been hacked, the news anchor apologized, according to AP and Vox.
Reid pledged to continue to bring hard facts and her unique perspective to her new role at MSNBC.
“The news business is dynamic and probably has never been more important,” Reid said on MSNBC recently. “With all that we are facing, I’m proud to bring the perspective of a Black woman, a daughter of immigrants, the wife and mother of a husband and kids who sadly are more vulnerable to police because of their color, a proud nerd, and a representative of the emerging America, to cable TV news.”
NBC Universal News Group Chairman Cesar Conde, who has set a goal to diversify the workforce at NBC News, MSNBC and CNBC, congratulated Reid on Twitter.
“Joy will prove once again her commitment to telling the truth about our country’s history, our present challenges and her hopes for America’s future. She’s the real deal,” he said.