When Joy-Ann Reid was growing up, she’d stay up late to watch “Nightline” and wake up early on Sunday mornings to watch “Meet the Press” and “The McLaughlin Group.” Now, as a political analyst, she’s a part of the world she grew up watching.

Reid hosts her own show on MSNBC called “AM Joy,” writes a political column in The Daily Beast and teaches the race, gender, and the media class at Syracuse University’s New York City campus. On Tuesday, she will deliver a lecture on SU’s main campus as part of the University Lectures series in Hendricks Chapel.

Journalism was something Reid was always interested in, but she didn’t think of it as a career, she said. She entered the pre-med track at Harvard University but realized it wasn’t for her. Shortly after the death of her mother, Reid took a year off school to figure out her next step.

She eventually found herself in New York City, where she worked at Columbia Pictures. From there, she decided to enter the film world. Reid returned to Harvard and graduated with a concentration in documentary filmmaking in 1991.

She and her husband later moved to Florida, where Reid found the opportunity to reinvent herself. She returned to the passion for political reporting that she had growing up and took a job at the Fox affiliate TV station in Miami to write for its morning show.

Since then, Reid has published articles in The New York Times, The Guardian, The Miami Herald and more. She was the former host of “The Reid Report” and was the managing editor of theGrio.com, an online news organization that focused on developing news and opinion stories for black audiences.

Reid has always felt an urge to connect with a younger generation of journalists, she said. So
when her co-worker, Brandi Kellam, mentioned a teaching position for the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications opening at SU’s Fisher Center in New York City, Reid seized the opportunity. She’d always been interested in teaching because her mother was a nutrition and dietetics professor at the University of Northern Colorado, she said.

Cheryl Brody Franklin, director of Newhouse in New York, was excited for Reid to join the staff.

“I feel like I could just tell that Joy would be a perfect fit for the position,” Franklin said. “I felt her passion and her excitement for teaching.”

While teaching a three-hour class may seem daunting for some, Reid uses her class as a chance to take a break from the cynical rhetoric she hears during the day, she said.

“What I do during the day is I interact with a very negative news cycle, and I’m trying to parse through it for the audience,” she said. “Whereas teaching the class, it’s a chance to kind of come at news and history and information from a different perspective with a group of people not yet in the industry.”

The course — race, gender, and the media — analyzes the fundamental diversity issues members of the media industry face, including examinations of the role of media in a multicultural society. The class also uses current events, such as the #MeToo movement, as a basis for discussion.

Reid kept the class relevant, said Sara Zadrima, who took her class last spring. Zadrima, who has since graduated and now works in New York City, added that Reid would often switch syllabus topics, trips or guest speakers based on what was more important in the news cycle at that time.

“It was things like this that made her class more like a real-time, real-world analysis of topics in race, gender and the media than a standard class at school,” Zadrima said.

Other aspects of the course include discussing the United States’ history in defining race and identity and analyzing representation in the media.

Reid’s lecture will be held Tuesday at 7:30 p.m. in Hendricks Chapel. Lorraine Branham, dean of the Newhouse School, will host the Q&A portion of the event.

“We’re talking about just how we approach (civil movements) as journalists, whether or not we’re being intelligent about the way that we approach race and gender as we’re telling stories as journalists,” Reid said about Tuesday’s event.

Reid will discuss how the media covered the civil rights movement and how the media covers modern civil rights movements, like Black Lives Matter and #NeverAgain. Branham said the conversation is meant to be an open discussion between Reid and students.

Published on April 2, 2018 at 9:21 pm

Contact Amy: abnakamu@syr.edu