Former ESPN host and columnist Jemele Hill is joining The Atlantic as a staff writer covering “the intersection of sports, race, politics, gender, and culture,” the magazine’s editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, announced Monday morning.
“I’m very pleased to announce that the great @jemelehill is joining @TheAtlantic as a staff writer, he wrote on Twitter. “She’ll be covering the intersection of sports, race, politics, gender, and culture for us. Welcome, Jemele.”
Hill, 42, left ESPN in August after nearly 12 years with the company. In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, the award-winning journalist admitted that she was ready to exit and “spread my wings in different ways.”
“There’s a wider playground that I can dabble in, and places where the discomfort is okay,” she told the magazine. “I wasn’t going to be able to be happy with myself if I didn’t adhere to this calling that’s beckoning me right now.”
Hill also revealed that she didn’t leave ESPN because it got difficult: “It was about the fact that I can’t commit to something that I know isn’t right for me, that I know isn’t going to bring out the best in me and that I know is going to be kind of a waste of time.”
ESPN will reportedly pay Hill more than $5 million over the next year to leave the network. Prior to their agreement to part ways, critics cited Hill’s anti-Trump tweets as evidence that ESPN had become too political. Her tweets about Trump being a “white supremacist” prompted viewer backlash late last year.
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