Sean Gregory / Las Vegas
Sean Gregory covers how sports intersects with power, money and culture for Time, using major events and star athletes to explain broader shifts in politics and business. His work focuses less on game results than on what sports institutions and personalities reveal about influence, opportunity and risk.
Sports as a window into power and politics
Gregory often treats sports as a political and cultural arena, not just entertainment. In his profile of Dana White and the rise of the UFC, he traces how a once-marginal promotion becomes a vehicle for political access, following its path “from the fringes to the White House” through campaign ties, media strategy and regulatory battles.
He returns to this kind of intersectional story across leagues, looking at how owners, commissioners, athletes and politicians use one another, and how those relationships shape decisions about events, rules and public messaging.
He writes frequently about athlete activism and the way social issues play out on the field and in locker rooms. His coverage follows how protests, voting drives, public health debates and labor disputes move from private conversations among players into visible, televised moments.
He is especially interested in how star athletes use their platforms to push institutions to change, and in the limits of that influence once broadcast partners, sponsors and governing bodies are involved.
Global events and the Olympics
Gregory is one of Time’s consistent voices on global tournaments, especially the Olympic Games. He uses Olympic cycles to examine geopolitics, national image-making and the pressure placed on individual competitors.
His stories highlight how host cities and organizing committees frame an event as a symbol of progress or recovery, while also tracking the cost, displacement and logistical strain that sit behind the spectacle.
On the athlete side, he profiles competitors across sports, focusing on how they manage expectations, mental health and commercial demands in the run-up to competition. These pieces often zoom in on a single moment - a qualifying failure, an injury comeback, a sponsorship deal, a viral performance - and use it to unpack the years of training, family pressures and federation politics that surround an Olympic career.
He treats Olympic athletes as workers inside complex systems as much as inspirational figures.
Business of sports and changing institutions
Gregory devotes a substantial share of his reporting to the business mechanics of modern sports. He covers how media rights, streaming platforms and real-time betting reshape the economics of leagues and events, and he explains what those shifts mean for fans and for the competitive balance on the field.
His pieces often parse new revenue streams, ownership structures and labor agreements in plain language, with a focus on who gains leverage and who loses it.
College sports is a recurring subject. He follows changes around athlete compensation, name-image-likeness rules, conference realignment and the expansion of postseason tournaments. His coverage pays close attention to the tension between the “amateur” label and the commercial reality of billion-dollar television contracts and coaching salaries.
He writes about how these shifts affect not only football and men’s basketball, but also Olympic and women’s sports that depend on the same institutional frameworks.
Long-form narrative and on-the-ground reporting
Gregory’s work for the magazine blends feature writing with reported analysis. Many of his stories are long-form pieces built around multiple interviews, historical context and document review rather than quick takes or highlight recaps. He tends to anchor a narrative in the experience of one person or team, then widen the frame to show how their situation reflects a structural change in the sport or industry.
He regularly reports from events and training environments, bringing in detail about venues, practice habits, game-day routines and the people around an athlete or executive. That field reporting underpins his profiles of coaches, commissioners and veterans, where he is less interested in color for its own sake than in how small scenes reveal judgment, ego, preparation or doubt.
His questions often steer sources toward decisions and trade-offs rather than generic inspiration - why they chose a particular strategy, what they sacrificed, and how they live with the outcome.
Across beats, Gregory writes in straightforward, accessible prose, with an emphasis on clear explanation. He favors reported insight over opinion, and his pieces typically leave room for multiple perspectives: players, league officials, agents, medical and legal experts, and people affected by decisions made far from the cameras. The result is sports coverage that treats games as part of larger systems of power, and that follows the consequences of sports decisions well beyond the final score.
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.