Sports journalism is a form of journalism that reports on sports topics and events. While the sports department within some newspapers has been mockingly called the toy department, because sports journalists do not concern themselves with the 'serious' topics covered by the news desk, sports coverage has grown in importance as sport has grown in wealth, power and influence.

Sports journalism is an essential element of any news media organization. Sports journalism includes organizations devoted entirely to sports reporting — newspapers such as L'Equipe in France, La Gazzetta dello Sport in Italy, Marca in Spain, and the defunct Sporting Life in Britain, American magazines such as Sports Illustrated and the Sporting News, all-sports talk radio stations, and television networks such as Eurosport, ESPN and The Sports Network (TSN).

In professional and some collegiate sports in the United States, it is common practice to allow properly accredited sports reporters into locker rooms for interviews with players and coaching staff after games, while the sports teams provide extensive information support.

Jeremy Schaap (b. August 23, 1969, New York City) is an American sportswriter, television reporter, and author. Schaap is a six-time Emmy Award winner for his work on ESPN's E:60, SportsCenter, and Outside the Lines.

He is a regular contributor to Nightline and ABC World News Tonight and has been published in Sports Illustrated, ESPN The Magazine, Time, Parade, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times.

A native and resident of New York City, Schaap is the author of Cinderella Man: James J. Braddock, Max Baer, and the Greatest Upset in Boxing History (Houghton Mifflin, ISBN 0-618-55117-4), a New York Times best-seller, and Triumph: The Untold Story of Jesse Owens and Hitler's Olympics.

Schaap is the son of the late journalist and broadcaster Dick Schaap. Like his father, Schaap is an alumnus of Cornell University and a former editor of The Cornell Daily Sun. Schaap was also a member of the Quill and Dagger society. He won the Dick Schaap Award for Outstanding Writing at the 2005 Emmys, an award named after his father, for an Outside the Lines feature titled "Finding Bobby Fischer." Schaap and his wife have one child, a daughter.

Benjamin "Frank" Deford, III (born December 16, 1938, in Baltimore, Maryland) is an American sportswriter and novelist.

In addition to his 50-year tenure at Sports Illustrated, where he now holds the title of Senior Contributing Writer, he appears regularly on National Public Radio and Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel on HBO, and has written 16 books. He has been named Sportswriter of the Year six times and was twice voted Magazine Writer of the Year by the Washington Journalism Review. In 2012 he became the first magazine-writer recipient of the Red Smith Award. He is also a long-time advocate for research and treatment of cystic fibrosis.

Deford began his career as a researcher in the baseball department of Sports Illustrated in 1962. In addition to his Sports Illustrated duties, he has also been a correspondent for HBO's Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel since 1995, a regular Wednesday commentator for National Public Radio since 1980. His 1981 novel Everybody's All-American was named one of Sports Illustrated's Top 25 Sports Books of All Time and was later made into a film of the same title. However, most of Deford's fiction is set out of the sports realm. The most recent of his ten novels is the acclaimed "Bliss, Remembered," a 1930s romance between a pretty young American and the son of a German diplomat, a story written from the point of a woman. He has also been a screenwriter on the films Trading Hearts (1987) and Four Minutes (2006).

Nathaniel Read "Nate" Silver (born January 13, 1978) is an American statistician, psephologist, and writer. Silver first gained public recognition for developing PECOTA, a system for forecasting the performance and career development of Major League Baseball players, which he sold to and then managed for Baseball Prospectus from 2003 to 2009.

In 2007, writing under the pseudonym "Poblano," Silver began to publish analyses and predictions related to the 2008 United States presidential election. At first this work appeared on the political blog Daily Kos, but in March 2008 Silver established his own website, FiveThirtyEight.com. By summer of that year, after he revealed his identity to his readers, he began to appear as an electoral and political analyst in national print, online, and cable news media.

The accuracy of his November 2008 presidential election predictions—he correctly predicted the winner of 49 of the 50 states—won Silver further attention and commendation. The only state he missed was Indiana, which went for Barack Obama by 0.9%. He also correctly predicted the winner of all 35 Senate races that year.

Hannah Storm (born Hannah Storen June 13, 1962) is an American television sports journalist, serving as co-anchor of ESPN's SportsCenter Monday–Thursday mornings, and is also host of the NBA Countdown pregame show on ABC as part of the network's NBA Sunday game coverage, until 2011.

Storm was born in Oak Park, Illinois, and is the daughter of sports executive Mike Storen, who was a commissioner of the American Basketball Association, general manager of that league's Indiana Pacers, Kentucky Colonels and Memphis Sounds franchises, and president of the Atlanta Hawks in the NBA. Her mother, Hannah G. Storen, is a successful real estate agent in Houston, Texas. She graduated from Westminster Schools of Atlanta in 1979 and the University of Notre Dame in 1983, with degrees in political science and communications. She is married to sportscaster Dan Hicks. The couple have three daughters: Riley, Ellery and Hannah.

Storm took her on-air name during her stint as a disc jockey for a hard rock radio station in Corpus Christi, Texas, in the early 1980s. While at Notre Dame, she worked for WNDU-TV, the Notre Dame-owned NBC affiliate in South Bend, Indiana. After graduation, she took a job as a disc jockey at KNCN-FM (C-101) in Corpus Christi, Texas. Six months later, she got a job at a Houston rock station KSRR 97 Rock as the drive-time sportscaster. Storm stayed in Houston for four years doing a variety of radio and television jobs, including hosting the Houston Rockets halftime and postgame shows and also hosted Houston Astros postgame shows on television. She worked as a very popular weekend sports anchor on WCNC TV 36 (formerly WRET) in Charlotte, NC in 1988-89. She made the leap to CNN from there.