CHICAGO – Former Los Angeles Times soccer writer Grahame L. Jones was named the recipient of the 2012 Colin Jose Media Award by the National Soccer Hall of Fame.

Jones will be honored at the National Soccer Hall of Fame and U.S. Soccer Inductionat FedExField ahead of the U.S. Men’s National Team game against Brazil on May 30 in Landover, Md. on Wednesday.

Jones began his Los Angeles Times tenure in January 1971 as a news reporter. But Jones truly made his presence felt with the implementation of the newspaper’s soccer beat, and he would go on to fill this role for nearly four decades. His first soccer assignment was covering a Poland-Mexico match at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum on Aug. 5, 1973. Both teams wound up qualifying for the 1974 World Cup in West Germany.

His “On Soccer” column was a fixture within Southern California for 38 years, and he retired with one final piece that ran on Sept. 3, 2011, entitled “It has been a golden era of soccer for this state.

Jones’ soccer writing included coverage of the North American Soccer League, Major League Soccer, the U.S. National Team and 12 men’s or women’s FIFA World Cups, as well as four Olympic Games, two European Championships and one Copa America. He was also the editor of Soccer Corner and Soccer International magazines and a columnist for Soccer America magazine and ESPN.

Jones is the seventh recipient of the Colin Jose Media Award and joins Jerry Trecker (sportswriter, 2004), Seamus Malin (broadcaster, 2005), George Tiedemann (photographer, 2007), Ike Kuhns (sportswriter, 2008), Alex Yannis (sportswriter, 2009) and Paul Gardner (sportswriter, 2010) as an honoree.