By Christopher Brito, CBS News 9:50 AM PST, January 27, 2021 Turner Sports
Veteran NBA reporter Sekou Smith has died, his employer Turner Sports announced Tuesday. He was 48.
The National Association of Black Journalists sports task force said Smith died due to COVID-19 complications and remembered him fondly. He was more than a colleague; he was a friend and brother to us and so many others, NABJ said in a statement.
Smith made his name as a beat writer covering the Indiana Pacers and later the Atlanta Hawks before joining Turner Sports in 2009. Since then, he was a multi-platform star, working as an analyst for NBA TV, NBA.com writer and Hand Time Podcast host. He is survived by his wife, Heather and their three children, Gabriel, Rielly and Cameron.
A company statement said there would be an independent investigation into issues raised in a report in the Los Angeles Times that accused an executive of making "racist, sexist, homophopic and discriminatory comments."
Two ProPublica projects have been honored with the National Association of Black Journalists’ 2020 Salute to Excellence Awards.
An investigation on the dispossession of African American landowners in the South, co-published with The New Yorker, won in the Magazine-Investigative category. Reporter Lizzie Presser came to the story after reading in a newspaper article that African Americans made up only 1% of the nation’s farmers. After poring over academic articles on the vulnerability of African American landowners who had, for generations, passed down land without a will, she decided to investigate the legal loopholes and systemic abuses that permitted the seizure of these so-called heirs’ properties.