David Veenstra
David Veenstra links sports, development and local policy by focusing on how specific venues, projects and events change what happens on the ground in and around Phoenix. His reporting combines the immediacy of game coverage with the detail-oriented style of business and real estate writing, often anchoring stories in hard numbers, amenities and economic impact. Across sports, luxury property, infrastructure and civic issues, he stays close to the facts and to the practical consequences for the communities he covers.
Sports reporting and Phoenix Mercury beat
Veenstra covers the WNBA’s Phoenix Mercury on a dedicated beat, producing game recaps, feature pieces and breaking news focused on the team and its players. His sports work extends into digital coverage for KTAR News and its sports vertical, where he writes and edits stories and helps shape how those pieces are presented online. The beat work keeps him close to the day-to-day of professional basketball, while his broader sports assignments connect teams, facilities and fan experience to the wider civic and business context.
Across this output, he treats sports as part of the local ecosystem rather than a separate entertainment silo, tying results and storylines to place, investment and community impact.
Luxury real estate and development coverage
Alongside sports, Veenstra writes frequently about high-profile real estate deals and new housing communities, with an emphasis on amenities, price points and how projects fit into existing neighborhoods. His story on a Paradise Valley estate with a shooting range and go-kart track that sold for a state record illustrates this style: he foregrounds distinctive features of the property and the scale of the transaction to show why the sale matters beyond the headline figure. His pieces on a luxury senior living community in the East Valley and a lock-and-leave housing community next to a Scottsdale golf club follow the same pattern, specifying unit counts, floor plans and location details to make development stories concrete for readers.
Several of these development articles are carried by a regional legal and real estate publication, underscoring his role in documenting how new projects and upscale communities are reshaping parts of the metro area.
City policy, infrastructure and public safety
Veenstra’s KTAR News archive shows consistent coverage of city policy decisions, infrastructure funding and public safety incidents, often tying official actions to measurable outcomes. He has reported on a federal judge granting the Arizona attorney general a temporary restraining order to limit a company’s access to sensitive personal data, translating legal filings into clear cause-and-effect for residents.
In another line of coverage, he documents a human trafficking awareness training effort that led to more than 90% of city employees completing the program and earning a special designation for Phoenix, framing the story through completion rates and civic recognition. His work on film production in the Phoenix area focuses on economic impact, highlighting a study that quantified tens of millions of dollars in local activity tied to 2024 film projects. Infrastructure stories, such as the major federal funding award for a new taxiway bridge at Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport, are treated similarly, with construction timelines, project budgets and the expected operational benefits laid out in straightforward terms.
He also contributes to coverage of public safety incidents, including a pedestrian killed on a West Valley street and a dead body found on a South Mountain trail, keeping those pieces terse, factual and anchored in official reports.
Food, hospitality and community events
Veenstra regularly writes about restaurants, breweries and local events, treating food and hospitality as part of the region’s economic and cultural fabric. His reporting on The Mexicano, a Phoenix restaurant reopening five months after a kitchen fire, tracks the timeline from closure to return and situates the comeback within the broader dining scene. Coverage of four new Tempe restaurants at ASU’s Novus Place zeroes in on the range of cuisines and the significance of the new openings for the campus-area marketplace. Event pieces, such as the long-running Four Peaks Brewing Oktoberfest at Tempe Town Lake, highlight dates, programming and family activities, turning what could be simple calendar items into more complete snapshots of how people gather and spend time locally.
In health and workplace stories, including Banner hospitals’ seasonal visitor restrictions and a Phoenix credit union being named the healthiest workplace in America, he again leans on clear metrics, designations and policy details to explain why individual institutions or events stand out.
4 more sports journalists.
Adair Reid
Adair Reid is a sports columnist for The Cavalier Daily who covers Virginia men’s programs with a blunt, fan-aware voice that treats them as long-term projects rather than one-off games. He focuses on trajectory, legacy and risk, using opinion columns to question coaching decisions and program strategy while grounding his arguments in recent results, records, tournament performance and roster realities. Men’s lacrosse is a recurring subject, and his work on the program’s coaching change shows how he uses a single decision to examine overall health, standards and competitive standing. He frames games in terms of stakes, identity and institutional expectations, emphasizing postseason implications, recruiting, national perception and alignment with a championship standard. He writes mostly in the first person only when needed, keeps the spotlight on institutional choices and brings analysis-first, evidence-based judgment to Virginia’s flagship men’s teams.
Adam Stern
Adam Stern covers the business of motorsports and combat sports at Sports Business Journal, focusing on how sponsorships, media deals and new events reshape racing and fighting. His beat includes NASCAR, IndyCar, Formula 1, NHRA, rallycross, UFC and boxing. He tracks brands, broadcasters, manufacturers, promoters and streaming platforms, with reporting on sponsorship strategy, rights deals, original content, series growth, team projects and technical regulations. He examines how Cadillac’s Formula 1 entry supports broader marketing aims, how F1 Academy builds commercial momentum and whether new MMA promotions can challenge UFC. His work includes short speed reads on deals and longer features on multi-party investments. He reports on the money and strategy behind the action, treating motorsports and combat sports as connected marketplaces shaped by branding, dealmaking and media innovation.
Albert Burneko
Albert Burneko writes about how systems of power bear down on ordinary people, using sports, politics, technology, food, and domestic life as entry points. He is an assignment editor and writer at Defector and part of its founding ownership group. His politics and capital reporting examines how policy, policing, and public rhetoric turn into harm for specific people, centering victims and vulnerable people. He also covers artificial intelligence, media criticism, and technology’s effects, asking who benefits and who absorbs the costs. His domestic writing focuses on parenting, bodily discomfort, and everyday frustration. His recurring Chefector column turns cooking failures into comic studies of impatience, ego, and routine. He writes sharp reported essays, first-person dispatches, mock explainers, and sports-adjacent guides. His work combines moral seriousness, comic voice, close attention to ordinary life, and a focus on how people live under larger systems.
Albert Samaha
Albert Samaha is a sports investigative reporter who uses games to examine how power, money and culture shape players, workers, fans and communities. He works in The Washington Post sports section, covering global tournaments, migration, fan culture, sports betting, match-fixing, ownership, NIL money, football safety, participation gaps and the changing culture of women’s basketball. His reporting connects events on the field to decisions in boardrooms, betting markets, government offices and law enforcement. He previously reported for BuzzFeed News and wrote for the Village Voice, San Francisco Weekly and the Riverfront Times. His work has also appeared in The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, The New York Times and The Paris Review. He writes long, deeply reported stories that combine narrative scenes, data analysis, public records, medical records and other documents.