Announcement from Sports Editor Jason Murray, Sports Deputy Editor Matt Rennie and Sports Investigations and Enterprise Editor Joe Tone:
We are thrilled to announce that Albert Samaha will join Sports as an investigative reporter, bringing additional firepower to a team that has helped The Post distinguish itself as a go-to destination for accountability reporting in sports.
An award-winning investigative reporter and narrative storyteller, Albert comes to The Post after nearly a decade at Buzzfeed News. As a national criminal justice reporter there, his investigation of sexual assaults by police officers led Congress and several states to enact reforms, and his probe of a wrongful conviction spurred the release of an innocent prisoner. As a global investigative reporter, he exposed how American political consultants helped rig an election in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
While this will be his first job covering sports, they have always been at the heart of Albert’s work — and his life. A former college football player, he spent his early career publishing deeply reported and artfully crafted sports stories in such alternative weeklies as the Village Voice and SF Weekly. His 2018 book about a Brooklyn youth football team, “Never Ran, Never Will,” was a finalist for a PEN award and was adapted into a Netflix documentary.
Albert is what we in Sports call a multitool player. His most recent book, “Concepcion,” a memoir of his Philippine-American family’s immigration experience, was a finalist for a 2021 National Book Critics Circle Award. He is a 2023 New America national fellow and an alum of the Pop-Up Magazine stage, and his work has been honored and cited by the Livingston Awards, the Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference, the “Best American Travel Writing” and “Best American Sports Writing” anthology series, and others.
A Northern California native, Albert has a bachelor’s degree in communication studies from the University of San Diego and a master’s degree in journalism from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He will be based in New York, helping us monitor some of sports’ most powerful people and institutions.
Albert starts Aug. 7. Please join us in welcoming him to The Post.
