Jason Lee Whitlock (born April 27, 1967) is a sports journalist. He co-hosts the daily sports TV show Speak For Yourself alongside Colin Cowherd on Fox Sports 1. Whitlock is a former sportswriter for ESPN and a former columnist at the Kansas City Star, AOL Sports and Foxsports.com, as well as a radio personality for WHB and KCSP sports stations in the Kansas City area. Whitlock was an all-state offensive lineman at Warren Central High School in Warren Township in the eastern part of Indianapolis, and he blocked for quarterback Jeff George, who later became the first overall pick in the 1990 NFL Draft. He attended Ball State University on a football scholarship, lettering two years as an offensive lineman. He graduated with a degree in journalism in 1990. Early career - Whitlock's first job was working part-time for the The Herald-Times in Bloomington, Indiana. His first full-time job came as a reporter for The Charlotte Observer. After approximately one year there, he joined the Ann Arbor News in 1992 and spent two years covering the University of Michigan.
Kansas City Star - In 1994, Whitlock was hired by the Kansas City Star. The Scripps Howard Foundation awarded Whitlock its National Journalism Award for commentary on March 7, 2008. Whitlock was the first sports writer to win the award and $10,000 prize. On August 16, 2010, the Kansas City Star announced that Whitlock would be leaving that paper. ESPN - In 2002, Whitlock started writing columns for ESPN.com's Page 2. Whitlock had guest-hosted several ESPN TV shows, including Jim Rome Is Burning, and Pardon the Interruption. He was a regular fill-in host on the The Jim Rome Show on Premiere Radio Networks. He also appeared regularly on ESPN's The Sports Reporters Outside the Lines.
Whitlock has also been published in Vibe, Playboy, and The Sporting News. In the June 2008 issue of Playboy, he wrote a 5,000-word column questioning American's incarceration and drug-war policies. Playboy headlined the column "The Black KKK", which provoked Whitlock into writing two columns—one in the Kansas City Star and another on Foxsports.com—criticizing Playboy editorial director Chris Napolitano for the misleading and inflammatory headline. He was the host of a morning-drive talk show, "Jason Whitlock's Neighborhood" on Sports Radio 810 WHB. Whitlock was the celebrity spokesman for Big Brothers Big Sisters of Greater Kansas City. His new website 'The Undefeated.com'[11] was scheduled to launch on ESPN.com sometime in the Summer of 2015. After over a year and a half of delays, ESPN announced that Whitlock would no longer serve as the editor in chief for 'The Undefeated', replaced on an interim basis by Leon Carter, the editorial director for the site. In October 2015, Whitlock's employment at ESPN ended.
