Terry Taylor

Terry Taylor's name rarely appeared over a story. Her job was the desk behind thousands of them. As sports editor of the Associated Press from October 1992 until November 2013, she ran the department whose copy landed on the sports pages of most daily newspapers in the country, and she was the first woman to hold the post. The Associated Press Sports Editors, a group made up largely of the people who received that copy each night, gave her the Red Smith Award in 2018.

It is a fitting kind of recognition for an editor. The honor is usually reserved for writers whose sentences readers know. Taylor's contribution was the reliability of everybody else's.

Terry Rosalind Taylor was born on October 4, 1952, in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, and grew up in nearby Chester. Her mother worked as an administrative assistant for the Internal Revenue Service. She studied journalism at Temple University, worked on the campus paper, and took her first job at The Charlotte News in North Carolina. In 1977 she joined the AP's Philadelphia bureau.

The move to sports came in 1981, when she transferred to the New York sports desk. She became assistant sports editor for enterprise in 1985 and deputy sports editor in 1987. She directed coverage of both the Winter and Summer Olympics in 1988, and she was on site at Candlestick Park when the earthquake stopped the 1989 World Series.

She left the AP for The New York Times in December 1990 and was back within a year, returning in September 1991 as an assistant chief of bureau. Thirteen months later, two days after her fortieth birthday, she was named sports editor. Over the following two decades she led the AP's coverage of fourteen Olympic Games, along with the weekly college polls, the championships and the everyday grind of scores and game stories that the wire exists to move.

The department she took over in 1992 filed to newspapers on a nightly deadline. The one she handed back in 2013 filed to websites at every hour and to newspapers as an afterthought. That shift, from a single evening cycle to a continuous one, was the largest change in the wire's working life since the teletype, and it happened on her watch without a bylined account of it. Editors do not get to write the story of their own tenure. The people who worked for her wrote it in the obituary instead.

Beyond doubt, a Hall of Famer.

That was Louis D. Boccardi, the former AP president, on her death. Jim Litke, a longtime AP columnist, said nobody in the business had sharper elbows when it came to knocking down barriers. Julie Pace, the AP's executive editor, called her a trailblazer who opened a path for the women who followed her into the department and the profession.

Taylor retired from the AP in November 2013, the same year she was diagnosed with breast cancer. The Association for Women in Sports Media gave her its Mary Garber Pioneer Award in 2016, and Temple's Klein College of Media and Communication inducted her into its hall of fame in 2017. The Red Smith Award followed in 2018.

The cancer metastasized in 2016. She died at home in Paoli, Pennsylvania, on November 14, 2023, at seventy-one. Her husband, Tony Rentschler, survived her. The AP, which had spent her career sending out other people's news, wrote the obituary itself.