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Rick Reeno has spent more than two decades beating boxing media to the punch. In 2003, that meant building BoxingScene into a round-the-clock news operation. Today, it means taking center stage as CEO and public face of The Ring.
For fight fans, The Ring carries weight no other outlet does. Founded in 1922 and nicknamed “The Bible of Boxing,” it has ranked fighters, crowned champions and documented the sport from Jack Dempsey to Naoya Inoue.
Since Turki Alalshikh acquired the publication from Golden Boy Promotions in 2024, Reeno has helped bring it back to print while closely assisting with expanding the brand into events, video, podcasts and fantasy contests. The Ring has also put its complete print archive online, dating back to its first issue and giving fans free access to more than a century of boxing history.
“It was time to reimagine our digital presence from the ground up,” Reeno said when the new site kicked off in January. “This relaunch reflects who we are now, and where we’re going.”
“Where we’re going” has increasingly meant getting closer to the fights themselves. In 2025, The Ring staged its first U.S. card in New York City, putting Ryan Garcia, Devin Haney and Teofimo Lopez under the lights in the middle of Manhattan. Reeno told the Associated Press the event could have sold out anywhere, but he wanted fans to look back decades later and remember “that crazy event in the heart of Times Square.”
That same big-event thinking showed up at the Canelo Alvarez-Terence Crawford launch in Riyadh. Reeno walked onstage with a custom version of The Ring’s championship belt, built for what he called “a mega-fight of this magnitude.” The belt cost £140,000, or roughly $188,000, and was, in his words, “by far the most expensive Ring belt ever created.”
The stages are bigger now, but Reeno’s read on boxing fans hasn’t changed. They want to feel close to the action, and he has spent his career finding new ways to put them there. That instinct is what made BoxingScene worth buying.
CBS Sports Digital acquired the site in 2018 and kept Reeno at the helm, where he promised “up-to-the-minute, accurate and exciting news from every corner of the boxing world.” The deal put his independent operation in the same portfolio as CBSSports.com, 247Sports and SportsLine, giving BoxingScene the kind of media exit most boxing outlets never get. When CBS merged with Viacom and the company later took the Paramount name, BoxingScene moved with it. Reeno stayed on as managing editor until 2024, closing out a run that started with a boxing website he built himself.
Reeno joined The Ring as COO later that year and became CEO in July 2025. By the following spring, the publication was presenting Tyson Fury’s comeback against Arslanbek Makhmudov at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, with Netflix making the main card available to its more than 325 million subscribers worldwide. The prelims streamed through The Ring’s own channels, giving the outlet another direct line to fight fans.
Reeno has also turned access into programming. On the Mr. Verzace Podcast, he has put Haney and Brian Norman Jr. in the same room, sat Lopez across from Shakur Stevenson and landed a joint interview with Inoue and Junto Nakatani.
Those conversations are reaching an audience that has grown fast. Sports Business Journal reported that The Ring’s YouTube channel went from roughly 7,000 subscribers in January 2025 to 268,000 by mid-March. By late June 2026, vidIQ counted 1.24 million subscribers and more than 336 million views.
Reeno spent 21 years building BoxingScene into a company CBS wanted to buy. His new job began with a much older name, but The Ring’s recent growth suggests he knows exactly what to do with it.
Rick Reeno has spent more than two decades beating boxing media to the punch. In 2003, that meant building BoxingScene into a round-the-clock news operation. Today, it means taking center stage as CEO and public face of The Ring.
For fight fans, The Ring carries weight no other outlet does. Founded in 1922 and nicknamed “The Bible of Boxing,” it has ranked fighters, crowned champions and documented the sport from Jack Dempsey to Naoya Inoue.
Since Turki Alalshikh acquired the publication from Golden Boy Promotions in 2024, Reeno has helped bring it back to print while closely assisting with expanding the brand into events, video, podcasts and fantasy contests. The Ring has also put its complete print archive online, dating back to its first issue and giving fans free access to more than a century of boxing history.
This story originally appeared on Entrepreneur
