Sandy Rosenbush

Sandy Rosenbush spent her career on the editing side of sports journalism, which is the side the public rarely sees and the side that decides what the public gets. The Associated Press Sports Editors’ own roll of recipients lists her affiliations as The Washington Post and Sports Illustrated. At the time of the award she was working for ESPN, where the Sports Journalism Institute’s board listing gives her title as remote news editor. She is one of a small number of editors, as opposed to columnists and reporters, to receive the honor.

The work most often attached to her name is the Sports Journalism Institute, where she serves as co-director alongside Leon Carter. Founded in 1992 with its first class in 1993, the institute runs a nine-week training and internship program for college students, with the stated aim of increasing the number of women and minorities in the nation’s sports media. By its own count it has graduated more than thirty classes and placed close to four hundred alumni in print, digital and television newsrooms.

Thirty-two classes, close to four hundred working alumni, and a co-director who has been there for most of them.

In 2009 the National Association of Black Journalists gave Rosenbush and Carter its Legacy Award for the institute. The Red Smith Award ten years later was the sports editors’ version of the same judgment: that the pipeline she helped build changed who gets to cover sports in this country.

Rosenbush has no Wikipedia article, and this archive has not found a detailed public biography to draw on. Birth date, hometown, education and the exact years at each newspaper are not documented in sources we can cite, so they are left out rather than guessed. What is on the record is enough to explain the award: senior editing posts at two of the most influential sports sections in the country, a long run at ESPN, and a training program that has fed newsrooms for three decades.