Sada Reed

Sada J. Reed is a veteran sports reporter, editor, and 2024-25 U.S. Fulbright Scholar to Denmark. Her research explores how sports journalists do their job, particularly how their routines and practices shape the content they create.​ Examples include challenges associated with sports journalists’ use of social media, hero mythology, and source selection in content creation, as well as role conflict and differences between how American and Russian sports journalists cover athlete doping scandals.

She earned her doctorate at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (2015) as a Park Fellow, completing her dissertation, Conflicting loyalties: An examination of the role community membership and sports fandom have on sports journalists’ interactions with whistleblowers, under the tutelage of Richard Cole Eminent Professor Daniel Riffe. She earned her master’s degree at the University of Minnesota in 2011, completing a summer study at the University of Iceland in Reykjavik and her thesis, Print sports journalists’ use of social media and its effect on professionalism, under the direction of advisor Kathleen A. Hansen. She earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Minnesota in 2003.

As a journalist, she served on sports desks at the Beaufort Gazette in Beaufort, South Carolina, the Jacksonville Journal-Courier in Jacksonville, Illinois, and the South Washington County Bulletin in Cottage Grove, Minnesota. She also was the features editor and digital specialist at the Kennebec Journal in Augusta, Maine.

Her research has been published in Journal of Sports Media, International Communication Research Journal, Communication & Sport, International Journal of Sport Communication, and Journalism Practice. She was a 2018 Kopenhaver Center Fellow, and won the 2013 Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication’s Sports Communication Interest Group’s top student paper award.

She teaches ethics and diversity in sports journalism for undergraduate and graduate students, and advanced issues in 21st-century sports and media, a graduate-level class that covers international sports governance, doping, whistleblowing, athlete activism, match-fixing, animals as athletes, concussions, and adapted sports.