DELANO R. MASSEY
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BIO

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Delano Massey joined Axios in 2022 as Managing Editor of Local. He joined the team as the company launched into a dozen new markets, including Detroit, Raleigh and Seattle. Massey leads Axios Local with Jamie Stockwell. Massey joins from CNN, where he was a supervising producer running the Washington-based team of producers, reporters and writers who covered the Justice Department, legal and criminal issues, Supreme Court, Department of Homeland security and immigration. Then, in the throes of a racial reckoning, he worked with CNN's President Jeff Zucker to create the network’s Race & Equality team, a hybrid unit providing news for all platforms. Massey helped recruit, interview, and select the team members. For more than a year, he juggled two demanding beats, spearheading legal coverage surrounding the 2020 election, the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol, and pushing the network into the right place on Race coverage as tensions simmered. Massey shifted his focus to race coverage at CNN, providing input on stories, scripts and shows that appear on CNN. He also appears on panels or speaks to universities about everything from criminal justice and race to diversity, equality and inclusion. 

Massey was previously a deputy news director in Chicago for The Associated Press. He helped supervise all-formats coverage in the central United States, the 14 states stretching from Texas to the upper Midwest. Among other things, he built the region's video editing operation from scratch, reorganized AP's Shared News Desk to be a cross-format operation focusing more on high-impact stories and improving presentation on countless stories. Massey, a former cops and courts reporter, pushed the entire region to be more aggressive in the use of FOIA. And, as a leader of the Race & Ethnicity team, he helped the wire service tell a number of stories that otherwise would have gone untold or not told as well, including a package on the Red Summer of 1919 and award-winning coverage of the anniversary of the Little Rock Nine.

Before joining AP, Massey was digital director at WEWS, the ABC affiliate in Cleveland. He oversaw News 5’s digital business and operations and led coverage of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland and the NBA championship for the Cavaliers. Massey was formerly the projects and digital content executive producer at WKYT, where he helped the station increase its web traffic, transition from text alerts to push notifications, and quarterbacked a site redesign in 2015. He was recognized in 2016 as the best digital journalist by the Kentucky Associated Press Broadcasters. 

Massey was previously the metro editor for the Lexington Herald-Leader, where he led coverage of everything from extreme weather events to the Kentucky Derby and riotous behavior surrounding the University of Kentucky’s NCAA championship. The Twitter account, @HLpublicsafety, which Delano created and ran, received the McClatchy's President's award for coverage of the UK celebration, which turned violent during the Final Four. While in Lexington, Massey spent several years teaching journalism at the University of Kentucky.

Massey is a 2018 graduate of the Kiplinger Program, the Poynter-NABJ Leadership Academy for Diversity in Digital Media, Leadership Lexington, the ASNE-API Minority Leadership Institute and he received management training at the Maynard Institute's Media Academy at Harvard University. In the fall of 2021, Massey was recognized as one of the Most Influential People of African Descent.

As a reporter, Massey authored a weekly column and wrote several enterprise and feature stories at the Akron Beacon Journal, and covered cops, courts and city issues for the Belleville News-Democrat. Massey, a graduate of the University of Akron in his home state of Ohio, has won numerous awards for breaking news, general news and investigative journalism.

“You can only become accomplished at something you love. Don’t make money your goal. Instead pursue the things you love doing and then do them so well that people can’t take their eyes off you."  
- 
Maya Angelou
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