Zack Carpenter is an award-winning sports writer, editor, photographer, and business owner with extensive experience across nearly every level and platform of the sports journalism industry.

Carpenter is the owner and publisher of Inside Nebraska, a multi-platform digital sports media company encompassing a website, video content, podcasts, and social media. Inside Nebraska is a core member of Rivals.com and Yahoo's national network of 100 team-specific college sports websites. Despite being the youngest owner and publisher at Rivals when he signed, Carpenter has turned Inside Nebraska into one of the most respected and highest-read sites in the network. His success stems from a wide range of skills in business operations, staff recruiting, team management, and content strategy, in addition to traditional journalism skills such as news judgment, ethics, reporting, interviewing, editing, and photography.

Carpenter began his professional career as the sports editor of a weekly newspaper in Illinois and as a high school sports reporter at a daily newspaper in Connecticut. He then moved to Ohio, where he worked as a beat writer and photographer covering Ohio State football and recruiting for multiple media companies.

Carpenter's work has taken him to cover and photograph three College Football Playoff games, including the 2021 CFP National Championship Game in Miami, as well as the 2020 and 2021 CFP national semifinal games in Arizona and New Orleans. He has also covered games in The Big House for the OSU-Michigan rivalry, The Horseshoe in Columbus, several Big Ten and NCAA Tournament games, the McDonald’s All-American games at the United Center in Chicago, and Kentucky basketball at Rupp Arena.

Carpenter has chronicled the journeys of football and basketball players at programs such as Oregon, UConn, Illinois, and Cal. He has interviewed notable coaches like Kentucky’s John Calipari and UConn’s Dan Hurley, covered an FCS national championship game, and spent a day with Adrian Wojnarowski at ESPN headquarters in Bristol, Connecticut, gaining rare all-access behind-the-scenes insights.

Above all his professional achievements, Carpenter cherishes his most significant career accomplishment in Connecticut, where he befriended the father of a local star athlete battling a terminal illness. Carpenter wrote a feature story that led to a massive influx of organ donors in the area, ultimately resulting in the father receiving the transplant that saved his life.

Carpenter graduated from Illinois State University with a degree in Journalism. During his time at ISU, he served as a news writer, beat writer covering football, basketball, and baseball, and eventually as the sports editor of the school's student newspaper. Carpenter credits his four years at ISU and two years at the student paper with laying the foundation and forming the fundamentals of journalism that continue to guide his work today.