Zoe Samios
Zoe Samios covers the business of sport through the lens of media, telecommunications and corporate deal-making at the Financial Review. She treats codes such as cricket and football as major media assets, focusing on the money, power and strategy behind fixtures, broadcast schedules and competitions. Her reporting connects player and fan anxiety on the ground with the commercial and regulatory decisions being made in boardrooms.
Sport as a media asset
Samios’ sport coverage centres on how professional competitions are structured, funded and controlled rather than on-game action or athlete profiles. In her reporting on Victoria’s push to reshape the Big Bash League, for example, she details the reactions of players and rival states while explaining what the proposed changes would mean for league governance and commercial returns. She routinely frames sporting stories around rights ownership, competition formats and the long-term value of marquee events to broadcasters and sponsors.
She pays close attention to the interests of clubs, states, national bodies and private investors when code structures are under review. Her stories often explore how new formats, expanded seasons or revised finals systems are designed to deliver larger audiences and better returns, and how those shifts affect players’ workloads and job security. This approach gives stakeholders an early view on where power is moving within a code and who stands to gain or lose from proposed reforms.
Broadcast rights and streaming battles
Across her sport and media coverage, Samios tracks broadcast rights negotiations as a central storyline. She reports on bidding contests involving free-to-air networks, subscription television and emerging streaming platforms, spelling out the contract values, key clauses and exclusivity arrangements that shape what fans can watch and where.
When codes renegotiate long-term deals, she examines how those agreements affect club finances, salary caps and investment in grassroots development.
She frequently connects sport to the broader streaming wars, showing how platforms view premium live rights as a way to drive subscriptions and reduce churn. Her stories highlight the trade-offs between reach and revenue when codes weigh free-to-air exposure against the lure of pay television or streaming money.
She also follows how production standards, scheduling demands and digital rights packages evolve from one deal cycle to the next, giving a clear picture of how viewing experiences are changing over time.
Media, telecoms and the pipes behind the product
Samios’ sport stories sit within a wider brief on media and telecommunications, and she uses that context to explain the infrastructure behind big games.
She reports on how telcos, internet providers and streaming platforms invest in networks and technology to handle live sport audiences at scale. Issues such as congestion, streaming latency and blackout provisions appear in her coverage not as technical footnotes, but as central factors in how rights deals are designed and how fans experience major events.
She also follows regulatory developments that touch both sport and media, including ownership rules, anti-siphoning frameworks and competition concerns when large media groups or telecoms seek to expand their control of premium rights. Her reporting often sets out how proposed regulatory changes could reshape who can bid for landmark events and what that means for viewers, advertisers and smaller players in the market.
Corporate manoeuvres and stakeholder tensions
Beyond individual rights deals, Samios covers the corporate strategies of broadcasters, streamers and telecommunications companies that rely on sport to anchor their business models. She reports on mergers, joint ventures and strategic alliances that influence how codes package their rights and how broadcasters share or carve up content. When new entrants challenge incumbents for key properties, she examines their funding sources, long-term plans and the risks they are prepared to take to secure a foothold.
Her stories frequently highlight tensions between players, clubs, leagues, broadcasters and regulators. In pieces like her coverage of Victoria’s attempts to reshape the Big Bash League, she gives clear voice to player concerns about job security and code direction while outlining the financial imperatives driving administrators.
This combination of stakeholder quotes, deal detail and structural analysis distinguishes her work from general sports reporting and makes her coverage a reference point for understanding where sport, media and telecoms intersect.
4 more sports journalists.
Aaron Timms
Aaron Timms is a sports writer at The Guardian who treats sport as a way to interrogate power structures, media ecosystems and cultural currents rather than to file match reports or transfer gossip. He focuses on sports media, ownership and era‑defining stars, tracking how broadcasting, business and masculinity shape what fans see and feel. His work ranges across football, basketball, US sports media and cricket, with recurring attention to US television networks, commentators, podcasts and the “sports bros” manosphere, and to governance, regulation and money in elite football. He writes about figures such as Kylian Mbappé and Victor Wembanyama as markers of new epochs in sport. Timms has also written for The Sydney Morning Herald, Salon, The Daily Beast, The New York Times and The New York Review of Books.
Adrian Proszenko
Adrian Proszenko is distinct for treating rugby league as a year-round ecosystem, with hard-news reporting on the NRL and the off-field decisions that shape it. He is a senior rugby league reporter for The Age, covering the NRL, State of Origin and elite club competitions. His beat spans player movement, governance and the business of the sport, with frequent reporting on squad changes, injuries, judiciary outcomes, selection calls, contracts, salary cap pressure and club politics. He also covers expansion discussions, franchise bids, venue decisions, broadcast and scheduling issues, and industrial disputes. His work relies on sourced detail from coaches, agents, club officials, administrators and players, and he uses reported news, direct quotes and specific facts to explain how decisions are made and what they mean.
Andrew Wu
Andrew Wu is a sports journalist at The Age whose AFL work uses game nights, especially for big clubs, to test how well teams are built, focusing on structure, depth and pressure rather than just the score. He writes where individual star performances meet system-wide problems, asking why a side can fail even when its marquee players deliver. His match analysis treats each game as evidence in a larger case about a club’s direction, with clear, direct reporting built from player roles, match‑ups and key passages that reveal mentality and adaptability. Wu covers major codes, particularly AFL and cricket, bringing a cross‑code view of how teams manage form, fatigue and selection over long seasons. He is drawn to list balance, system integrity and whether clubs and national sides can turn talent into reliable performance with stakes beyond a single match.
Andrew van Leeuwen
Andrew van Leeuwen covers top-level motorsport with a focus on how rules, governance and competitive dynamics shape what happens on track. He writes for Speedcafe about Supercars and international series, treating officiating and regulation as core competitive factors rather than background noise. His reporting follows how race control and judicial processes influence Supercars outcomes, unpacking stewards’ calls, penalties, protests and appeals and linking them to points, grids and race results. He also runs the week-to-week Supercars beat, tracking race weekends, team form, strategy, technical changes, balance of performance shifts and the driver market. Team principals and drivers feature heavily in his coverage of car development, engineering changes and intra-team dynamics. He consistently explains Gen3 regulations, parity debates, format and calendar changes, and covers major global series through the lens of governance, commercial shifts and high-level regulatory change.