On my very first day of news work, I attended the funeral of a man who had frozen outside in the cold. It was immediately obvious that reporting would widen the scope of my life experiences.
I elected to remain a general assignment reporter at the Staten Island Advance, then a mid-sized daily newspaper, from 2005-2010. I enjoyed the diversity and editors prized my versatility. My writing spanned all news categories, from health, crime and education to politics, business and art. For two years I served as the staff writer for two regional, weekly front sections of the newspaper, producing 10-12 stories a week. For my coverage of the borough’s West African refugee population when the warlord Charles Taylor went to trial in The Hague, I won first place from the New York Association of Black Journalists.
Editors called on me for stories they said needed “a writer” to capture a mood or place events in context, and they valued my empathy when a story called for tender handling.
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