Nick Sloan
Nick Sloan covers sports for KMBC 9 News, including stories that extend beyond the field when star athletes and their property become the focus of law-enforcement action. His work links major professional teams and their stars to the broader news agenda, treating them as central figures in both sports culture and public-safety stories.
Off-field news involving star players
Sloan’s sports coverage includes off-field developments that put well-known athletes in the center of a news story. In his report on the burglary ring that targeted Patrick Mahomes and Travis Kelce, he works from a crime-focused headline while grounding it in the public interest generated by two of the most prominent names in professional football.
By framing the case around these players, he shows how closely he follows news that matters to fans even when it unfolds far from the stadium.
Law enforcement and investigations intersecting with sports
Sloan’s reporting on the burglary ring emphasizes the investigative and legal side of a story that starts in the sports world but quickly becomes a complex criminal case. The piece tracks multiple suspects, an alleged ring, and arrests made in Argentina, reflecting his role in translating law-enforcement developments into clear updates for an audience that primarily knows the case through the athletes involved.
His work in this space highlights the stakes for victims and the progress of investigators, while keeping the sports context front and center.
Connecting team fandom to broader public interest
By building a headline around Mahomes and Kelce in the context of a burglary investigation, Sloan treats team stars as anchors for a wider narrative about crime, security, and high-profile targets.
His approach uses the intense interest around local football heroes to draw attention to a story that is fundamentally about public safety and justice. That mix of sports relevance and hard-news framing characterizes how his sports beat can overlap with general news priorities at the station.
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.