Career
Ludtke always had a passion for sports, and upon graduation, she began working for American Broadcasting Company Sports and Sports Illustrated. Ludtke was notably at the center of a federal lawsuit that is credited with giving equal access to Major League Baseball players to women sports reporters, "Melissa LUDTKE and Time, Incorporated., Plaintiffs, v. Bowie KUHN, Commissioner of Baseball".
Ludtke was a writer and editor for the Nieman Reports magazine of Harvard University"s Nieman Foundation for Journalism from 1998 to 2011.
She then served as the Executive Director of the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism at Brandeis University from 2011 to 2013. Before her editor job at the Nieman Foundation, she had been a correspondent with Time magazine and a reporter/researcher with Sports Illustrated and with Columbia Broadcasting System News.
At Sports Illustrated, she was given a Front Page Award, and at Time was the recipient of several journalism awards. In July 2013, Ludtke was featured in "Let Them Wear Towels" by Anne Sundberg and Ricki Stern, a short documentary on females working in male locker rooms.
In 2012 Ludtke was nominated by the New York University Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute as one of the "100 Outstanding Journalists in the United States in the Last 100 Years".
