Claire Smith has worked in the news industry since 1976, and served as news editor with ESPN’s Remote News and Cross Platform departments since 2007.
Previously, Smith spent 32 years in the newspaper industry, working as a sportswriter and editor at The New York Times, Philadelphia Inquirer, Philadelphia Bulletin and Hartford Courant. Her work as a beat reporter, national baseball writer and columnist has taken her around the world. She has covered all but two World Series since 1982.
Smith has twice been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, the first for team reporting on the Courant’s 1987 special section regarding the history of blacks in baseball, and the second for general assignment reporting for The Times.
Last year, Smith was named the first winner of the Sam Lacy-Wendell Smith Award, presented by the Shirley Povich Center for Sports Journalism at the University of Maryland’s Philip Merrill College of Journalism. The award is presented to sports journalists who have made significant contributions to racial and gender equality in sports.
Smith has previously won legacy awards from the National Association of Black Journalists and the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, as well as the Mary Garber Pioneer Award from the ASsociation for Women in Sports Media. She is a lifetime Gold Card member of the Baseball Writers Association of America and one of the few women to have gained eligibility to cast ballots in the sport’s annual Hall of Fame election.
Founder of Claire Smith: Baseball Around The Horn, a baseball blog, Smith co-authored Don Baylor’s autobiography, Nothing But The Truth, A Baseball Life, in 1988. She was also a contributor to the compilation, A Kind of Grace: A Treasure of Sports Writing by Women, in 1994.
Smith established the Bernice Anastasia Ximines Smith Scholarship at Temple to honor her mother, also a former Temple student, which recognizes female journalism students who reflect her late mother’s tenacity and dedication to the pursuit of higher education.