Flo Anthony, pioneering Black entertainment journalist and television personality, dies at 74
TheGrio...
From Page Six to television and radio, Anthony built a decades-long career covering some of entertainment’s biggest names.
Florence “Flo” Anthony, the entertainment journalist whose byline and on-air presence made her one of the most recognizable Black women in celebrity media for four decades, died Aug. 6 of cancer at 74.
Her death was confirmed to the New York Amsterdam News, her longtime publication, by Jack Hirsch, biographer of her husband, Olympic and professional boxing champion Michael Spinks.
Born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 1952, Anthony’s path into journalism ran through the boxing world, where she worked as a publicist for Muhammad Ali, Larry Holmes and Spinks himself. She joined the New York Post in 1986 as an agate clerk with ambitions of covering sports, an arrangement that ended when editors moved her to entertainment. As she recounted in a 2013 interview cited by Deadline, the transition came with a blunt assessment of her performance in the sports role, but the result was historic. She described going “from the first African American woman in the sports department to the first African American woman in the entertainment department,” ultimately becoming the first woman on staff in the department that houses Page Six.
Television made her a household presence. Anthony became a regular contributor and occasional co-host on E!’s “The Gossip Show” across its entire run from 1993 to 1998, and appeared on programs hosted by Joan Rivers, Maury Povich, Sally Jessy Raphael and Geraldo Rivera. She was also a frequent voice on TV One’s “Unsung” and “Life After.”
Her weekly “Go with the Flo” column launched in the Amsterdam News in the early 2000s and went into syndication, running alongside her national radio segments. She served as publisher and editor-in-chief of Black Noir and edited Black Elegance, and authored several novels.
Anthony held firm views about the work itself, defining a journalist as someone who researches, talks to people and breaks stories rather than lifting material from elsewhere.
She began dating Spinks in 1987, during his reign as IBF heavyweight champion, and the two married earlier this year. Details on survivors and memorial arrangements were not immediately available.