Background and career
Joy-Ann M. Lomena-Reid (née Lomena; born December 8, 1968) is an American political commentator and television host. She was a national correspondent for MSNBC and is best known for hosting the political commentary program The ReidOut from 2020 to 2025. Her previous anchoring credits include The Reid Report (2014–2015) and AM Joy (2016–2020). The New York Times described Reid as a "heroine" emerging from the political movements and protests against Donald Trump. She has written three books: Fracture: Barack Obama, the Clintons, and the Racial Divide (2016), The Man Who Sold America: Trump and the Unraveling of the American Story (2019), and Medgar and Myrlie: Medgar Evers and the Love Story That Awakened America (2024).
Reid was born Joy-Ann Lomena in Brooklyn, New York City. Her father was from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and her mother a college professor and nutritionist from Guyana. Her parents met in graduate school at the University of Iowa in Iowa City. Reid was raised Methodist and has one sister and one brother. Her father was an engineer who was mostly absent from the family; her parents eventually divorced and her father returned to the Congo. She was raised mostly in Denver, Colorado, until the age of 17, when her mother died of breast cancer and she moved to Flatbush, in Brooklyn, to live with an aunt. Reid graduated from Harvard University in 1991 with a concentration in Visual and Environmental Studies. In a 2013 interview, Reid recalled that her college experience was a quick immersion into a demographically opposite place from where she lived, from a community that was 80 percent African American to a community that was 6 percent African American. She had to learn to live with roommates and people who were not her family. She paid her own bills and tuition while at Harvard and said it was a good learning and growing experience overall.
Reid began her journalism career in 1997, leaving New York and her job at a business consulting firm to begin working in South Florida for a WSVN Channel 7 morning show. She left journalism in 2003 to work with the group America Coming Together to oppose the Iraq War and President George W. Bush. She later returned to broadcasting as a talk radio host and worked on Barack Obama's 2008 presidential campaign. From 2006 to 2007, Reid was co-host of Wake Up South Florida, a morning radio talk show broadcast from Radio One's then Miami affiliate WTPS, alongside "James T" Thomas. She served as managing editor of The Grio (2011–2014), as a political columnist for The Miami Herald (2003–2015), and as editor of The Reid Report political blog (2000–2014). Reid also teaches a Syracuse University class in Manhattan exploring race, gender, and the media. She and her husband, Jason, cofounded Image Lab Media Group, a production company, in 2005.
From February 2014 to February 2015, Reid hosted her own MSNBC afternoon cable news show, The Reid Report. The show was canceled on February 19, 2015, and Reid was shifted to a new role as an MSNBC national correspondent. Beginning in May 2016, Reid hosted AM Joy, a political weekend-morning talk show on MSNBC, and was a frequent substitute for other MSNBC hosts, including Chris Hayes and Rachel Maddow. As of 2018, Reid's morning show on Saturdays averaged nearly one million weekly viewers. In 2017, Reid ranked fourth among Twitter's top tweeted news outlets and most tweeted journalist at each outlet. The Daily Dot credited her in August of that year with coining the term KHive for supporters of Kamala Harris. In July 2020, MSNBC announced that Reid would host The ReidOut, a new Washington-based weeknight commentary show in the 7 p.m. Eastern time slot vacated by the March 2020 retirement of Hardball host Chris Matthews, making her cable's first Black female primetime anchor. On February 23, 2025, The New York Times reported that MSNBC had canceled The ReidOut, with plans to air its final episode during the week of February 24–28. The final broadcast of The ReidOut would air on February 24, 2025.
The day prior to the New York Times report of her ouster, Reid launched The Joy Reid Show as a channel on YouTube through Image Lab.
In 2015, Reid gave the inaugural Ida B. Wells lecture at Wake Forest University's Anna Julia Cooper Center. In 2016, The Hollywood Reporter said she had the "ability to break down complex issues in a way that makes them digestible and accessible." In 2018, The New York Times stated that "Ms. Reid, the daughter of immigrants, has emerged as a 'heroine' of the anti-Trump 'resistance'." Reid was a 2003 Knight Center for Specialized Journalism fellow. In 2018, Reid was nominated for three NABJ Salute to Excellence Awards. One for her segment in which a pastor is pulled to safety at the Charlottesville white nationalist march, one for her reporting on damage caused by the hurricanes on the US Virgin Islands, and one for the segment that won her an award for "Time: The Kalief Browder Story," in which Reid sat down with Kalief's brother Deion Browder and filmmaker Julia Mason. In 2016, Reid received the Women's Media Center's Carol Jenkins Visible and Powerful Media Award. Reid received a 2025 Gary Webb Anti-Censorship Award from PEN Oakland.
