Tommy Deas of the Tuscaloosa News has been elected vice chairman of APSE's Southeast Region. Deas outdistanced Ed Reed from the News Press in Fort Myers, Fla.
Deas has been executive sports editor of the News since March of 2008 and since has taken its print and Web products to new heights.
In the last four years, the News has been awarded with six top 10 APSE section awards in addition to two top 10 website awards, six top 10 writing awards and one top 10 multimedia award. During that time, Deas has been taken an active role in APSE. He has been a contest judge; he is a member of the diversity committee and was part of the panel that presented the session on “3-D Chess”, a discussion on planning and execution of big events across multiple platforms, including online,
print and social media at this summer’s convention in Boston.
Deas' track to the leader of the News sports department began at age 16 when he began working as a stringer and call-taker for News. He continued in that part-time role through graduation from the University of Alabama in 1986.
His post-college career began with a nine-month internship with the Birmingham News before working for five years as prep writer for the now-defunct Nashville Banner.
At the Banner, Deas was responsible for coverage of 70 area high schools and maintained a staff of more than a dozen stringers. He left the Banner to work one year with a start-up publication called The Sports Page as the senior writer, but returned to Tuscaloosa in 1990 when the publication went out of business.
He returned to the Tuscaloosa News as a part-time writer until he was hired as interim sports editor in 1993, and stayed on as a sports writer when the sports editor returned from a year-long leave of absence.
He covered the University of Alabama, small college, high school and community sports until his promotion in 2008. Deas will serve as vice-chair to new chair John Bednarowski of the Marietta Daily Journal for two years before taking over the chair in the summer of 2013.
