Todd Jones

Ohio State Alumni Magazine - senior writer

Press Box Access - podcast host and producer

Assertive, dependable, insatiably curious journalist, producer, and host with fresh, unexpected takes on assignments as brief as a photo caption and as expansive as the Olympics. Pursues meticulous details and big-picture “so what” of every assignment, prioritizing subjects and audiences in storytelling. Nurtures vast network of contacts, colleagues, and former story subjects. Accomplishments include: * Reporting from national and global events, including Hurricane Katrina and the Olympics. * Earning national accolades for investigative and public affairs journalism and sportswriting. * Launching, producing, and hosting award-winning podcast capturing inside stories of veteran sports journalists. * Hosting pilot podcast for alumni of The Ohio State University.

Todd Jones

Ohio State Alumni Magazine - senior writer

Press Box Access - podcast host and producer

Press Box Access
Todd Jones hosts a podcast with other sportswriters who knew the greatest athletes and coaches, and experienced first-hand some of the biggest sports moments in the past 50 years. They’ll share stories behind the stories -- some they’ve only told to each other.
Evergreen Podcasts
One Degree Greater
Todd Jones hosts an Ohio State podcast that tells stories about Buckeyes blazing their own paths in the challenging, thrilling years after graduation.
Ohio State University
Rare Earth
In just a handful of soil, Rattan Lal ’68 PhD sees the key to feeding people, to preserving their land for generations, to making Earth a better place for all of us. This connection, and this message he’s now spread around the globe, began 60 years ago in India, when a boy seized a chance to learn.
Ohio State Alumni Magazine
Audio story: Hear how a Buckeye doctor helps Navajo Nation
This is an audio version of a story that I wrote for the Ohio State Alumni Magazine about Dr. Christina Knight's work in Navajo Nation. Here's the link to read the print version of the story: https://alumnimagazine.osu.edu/story/christina-knight
osu.edu
The Links Between Bonds and Griffey End When the Fans React
CINCINNATI, July 3 – Warm hearts greet his every move now, as if Ken Griffey Jr. were a dog-eared scrapbook rediscovered in the corner of an attic. Fans practically had a coronation for him when he recently returned to Seattle, cheered him in tough Philadelphia and have warmed to their native son here after seven-plus seasons of a relationship that Griffey described as awkward.
The New York Times
Biloxi After Hurricane Katrina: ‘It’s like the end of the world’
BILOXI, Miss. — A man runs into the middle of the road, through broken glass and other debris. His red hair is bouncing off his shoulders, and his arms are waving frantically. “You got any rope, man?’’ he yells. He looks frazzled, desperate. There’s a dagger sticking out of the waistband of his light blue swim trunks.
The Columbus Dispatch
Three men in a taxi out to prove TV view of disaster is overblown
NEW ORLEANS — Black waters part as a taxi creeps along flooded S. Carrollton Avenue. Three men emerge from the dusty car and gaze at the Riverbend section of their hometown, once so exotic but now toxic in the wake of Hurricane Katrina and its subsequent flooding. “This is an eerie feeling,’’ Robbie Compton says. “Nothing is moving. There’s usually street cars and pretty girls running up and down all day.’’ Streets and houses are nearly empty in the neighborhood, near the Garden District. Fallen tree branches, brown leaves and electrical lines lie everywhere. Huey and Blackhawk helicopters buzz overhead in the blue sky. Fewer than 10,000 of its 484,000 residents remain in New Orleans, a Gulf Coast ghost town occupied by the U.S. military. And three Good Samaritans in a United Cab.
The Columbus Dispatch
Away from war, Iraqis get chance to cheer
PATRAS, Greece — The noise began before the game, coming from down in the soul and rising up with the power of joy. There was intensity to the sound, as if it had a life of its own, and it roared up through Pampeloponnisiako Stadium and over the towering peak of nearby Panahaiko mountain. The weary in far-off Baghdad probably heard it and smiled. “Welcome! Welcome Iraq! Welcome! Welcome Iraq! Welcome! Welcome Iraq!’’
The Columbus Dispatch
Dan Gilbert unplugged: what makes the mercurial Cavs owner tick
The font is cast on Dan Gilbert. His image is strapped to his own words, the ones blasted out two years ago in a fit of howling rage. Those 411 words in an infamous letter were meant to soothe the latest wounds of a beleaguered city's sports fans in the w
Sports Illustrated
Soul mates and science: Here, he found 2 loves
Looking back, it all seems audacious. It was 1954. A bus dropped off a young Black man in the rain in Columbus, a city where he had never been. Howard M. Johnson was more than 400 miles from his rural Maryland home, which had lacked running water and cent
osu.edu
One last day of golden moments for Jack
ST. ANDREWS, Scotland — Everything about the man seemed to glow, as if the candle of youth burned once again inside his aged body. At certain angles in the bright sun, his face and blond hair looked just as they had years ago, at the height of his golfing dominance. There was a bounce in his gait, fire in his belly, a gleam in his eye. “I’m hitting it great so far,’’ Jack Nicklaus said to no one in particular after striping a tee shot on the 11th hole. He looked as if he could have played forever, not as if he was 65, in his final year of exemption to the British Open as a past champion.
The Columbus Dispatch
Secrecy 101 - How athletic departments use FERPA as a shield
Across the country, many major-college athletic departments keep their NCAA troubles secret behind a thick veil of black ink or Wite-Out. Alabama.Cincinnati. Florida. Florida State. Ohio State. Oklahoma. Oregon State. Utah. They all censor information in the name of student privacy, invoking a 35-year-old federal law whose author says it has been twisted and misused by the universities. Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, which he crafted to keep academic records from public view. A six-month Dispatch investigation found that FERPA, as it’s commonly called, is a law with many conflicting interpretations. And that makes it virtually impossible to decipher what is going on inside a $5 billion college-sports world that is funded by fans, donors, alumni, television networks and, at most schools, taxpayers. The law is interpreted differently even within the same state. Kent State and Miami University are much more open than Ohio State University, for example. And it’s not just in Ohio. “Some clarity would be helpful to us,” said OSU President E. Gordon Gee.
The Columbus Dispatch
BACK IN THE HUNT - Disabled vet finds peace in the woods
McCONNELSVILLE, Ohio — Here comes the deer, wandering through the woods of Morgan County, his slow steps cracking twigs and leaves. The man leans forward in the wheelchair and watches the young buck down in the gully. The deer stops 30 yards in front of him. The man’s heart thumps. He raises the rifle and looks through the scope. The deer looks directly at him. There is one bullet in the man’s .50-caliber Hawken muzzleloader. All you need, hunters say, is one shot. In life, however, you sometimes need more.
The Columbus Dispatch
WILL TO LIVE - Disease draws Columbus couple into a search for serenity
One plasma cell put her in this bed. One abnormal cell in her bone marrow began multiplying, overwhelming the production of healthy cells. Nobody knows when this rogue process started, and doctors aren’t sure why it happened. They offer only chemotherapy, not a cure, on this afternoon last autumn at the Ohio State University Medical Center. Audrey Luthringer accepts chemo despite knowing that the toxic drug will cause her hair to fall out and could send her back to the hospital, as it did two weeks ago after her first treatment. She takes chemo because she wants to live, wants to someday be healthy enough to share life’s joys with the person she loves. So Audrey sits up in bed, red-faced, a tube in her chest, and takes momentary comfort in speaking on the telephone to her partner, Lee Hopkins. “I love you, too,” Audrey says. “I know. Everything is going to be all right. Everything is OK. Everything is fine.”
The Columbus Dispatch
Presence still felt
The pain of mourning is eased in her Columbus home, a Garage Mahal of Dale Earnhardt memorabilia. Dale is on the walls, on the floor, and on the couch. Dale is on bookshelves, on the coffee table, on the refrigerator, and on top of the TV. Dale is in china cabinets, in the hallway, in bedrooms and in the living room.
The Columbus Dispatch
Can a Columbus man living in the woods find his way home?
The boy’s chin rests on his thumb, his head tilted to the right, cocksure. He has his father’s nose, the nose of the man sitting next to him, the man whose restaurant he robbed. The kid with the mop of dishwater-blond hair pleads guilty to grand theft and breaking and entering. The Franklin County judge commits 14-year-old Jimmy Thivener to a juvenile jail, where he serves eight months. Twenty-five years later, Jimmy sits in a canvas tent in the woods — his home for nearly four years. Social workers are trying to bring him back from the edge of society, but the loner knows he controls his own future. He must confront his past, or his life will be spent outside the mainstream. He’s up early, as usual, awakened by thousands of birds. One little finch flies inside the tent. Jimmy breaks off pieces of hot dog and feeds them to the lost bird. Outside, chirping and flapping wings fill the air. They are the sounds of movement. Sounds of life.
The Columbus Dispatch

About

Todd Jones

Live TV appearances

Frequent radio guest

Open to change

Always curious

Active on social media

Video

Podcasting

I have spent more than three decades telling stories.

I've told them in newspapers and magazines, on podcasts, websites, TV, radio and social media, in public speeches, in 100 words and 10,000 words, over months and in minutes.

Stories from Japan, Australia, Greece, Scotland and nearly every major city in the United States. Stories from the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, from America’s biggest sporting events and from the worldwide spotlight of the Olympics. Stories from locker rooms, classrooms and hospital rooms. From a state senator’s office and a homeless man’s tent. From suburban mansions and the sewers under the streets of downtown Columbus.

I've told stories from our nation’s most famous arenas and stadiums, from tiny gyms and barren fields. From the immigration cell of a county jail and inside a military Humvee. From the quiet of a lonely senior citizen’s bedside and the middle of a roaring crowd of Iraqi soccer fans.

Now I tell stories for the Ohio State Alumni Magazine and the university’s marketing department. As senior writer and podcast host, I work with a highly collaborative team of writers, photographers, multimedia producers and designers to produce strategic brand narratives across multiple channels.

I'm also telling stories as host of Press Box Access, a podcast with veteran sportswriters as guests. My show was honored with an international VEGA Digital Award in 2021. Press Box Access also won a 2021 Gold Davey Award for podcast excellence.

Prior to working in higher education, I received more than 50 journalism awards as a newspaper reporter and columnist, specializing in news narrative projects and sports enterprise. Among those honors were the Sunshine Award from the national Society of Professional Journalists, the Eugene S. Pulliam First Amendment Award from the Society of Professional Journalists and the First Amendment citation from the national Associated Press Managing Editors Association. The AP named me Best Sports Writer in Ohio three times and a finalist in their national contest five times. The Columbus Dispatch nominated me for the Pulitzer Prize four times.

I’ve also worked for the Los Angeles Times, the Cincinnati Post, and the Lexington Herald-Leader. I’ve been a contributing writer for the New York Times, Sports Illustrated, the ESPN College of Football Encyclopedia, Sports on Earth, Cincinnati Magazine, Denison Magazine, Capital Magazine, and the Ohio History Connection.

My major assignments have included the Summer and Winter Olympics, Super Bowl, World Series, Final Four, College Football National Championship, the Rose, Orange, Sugar and Fiesta bowl games, British Open, Ryder Cup, PGA Championship, Kentucky Derby, Belmont Stakes, Indianapolis 500, and NFL, NHL, NBA and Major League Baseball playoffs.

Print. Digital. Audio.

I'll tell you a story.