Madison J. Gray is a veteran journalist whose career has spanned three decades, and taken him to numerous places around the world. A native of Detroit, he began his career at The Detroit News as a reporter covering the city and its enclaves Highland Park and Hamtramck. During his tenure there, he was also a Poynter Institute Fellow in its “Push the Edges” program, which emphasized community journalism. Moving to New York, he joined the staff of the New York Times website as a producer responsible for national, political and metro coverage and was a part of the early growth of the organization into web journalism.
Returning to full time reporting, he became part the Associated Press in its New York City bureau, where he served as a newsperson and overnight editor. His career later took him to West Africa, where he served as a news writer and reporter for Jubilee Radio in Keta, Ghana. Returning to the states, he spent several years with TIME.com, where he won an award for his retrospective on the 1992 Los Angeles social uprising. He also wrote and produced a major multimedia project in which Martin Luther King’s last four living aides were interviewed about witnessing his assassination in 1968.
After serving as Front Door editor with CBSNews.com, where he managed web coverage of major events like the ebola outbreak of 2014 and the Ferguson, Mo, protests, he took the leadership of EBONY.com, where he steered the website’s coverage of more critical Black topics including the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement and the Flint Water Crisis. He later led BET.com’s newsroom as the COVID pandemic took root, along with navigating readers through news surrounding the killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and other victims of police violence and related court trials.
Gray is a 1992 graduate of Central Michigan University where he studied journalism and history and was also a Knight Digital Media fellow in 2009. He was won several awards from the New York Association of Black Journalists for feature and in-depth/investigative reporting.