In October 1993, three months after completing U.S. Peace Corps Service in Bulgaria, I joined the staff of Herald Community Newspapers as an entry-level reporter, and over the next nearly three decades, I published more than 4,000 articles and columns for this award-winning outlet while rising through the newsroom ranks to executive editor. It was a bitter-sweet moment when I left the Herald to teach full-time at Hofstra University in 2022.
I loved my work as a community journalist and newsroom manager, and had watched the Herald grow from 12 to 20 editions, but the classroom beckoned.
Teaching and Academic Research
I have taught journalism at Hofstra since February 2009—for my first 12 years as an adjunct professor and since September 2022 on the tenure track. Educating the next generation of journalists is now my calling, though I still regularly report stories forThe Long Island Advocate, Hofstra’s online, community-based news outlet for which I serve as faculty editor and adviser, the Herald, La Tribuna Hispana and, on occasion, Newsday on its op-ed pages. .
My academic research centers on the effect of news coverage on communities of color, particularly six neighborhoods surrounding Hofstra: Elmont, Freeport, Hempstead, Roosevelt, Uniondale, and Westbury. Most recently, the research paper that I co-authored with my Hofstra colleagues Aashish Kumar and Mario Murillo—The Suburban News Desert: How Media Outlets Punish Communities of Color with Crime Coverage—was awarded First Place, Best Faculty Paper by the Community Journalism Interest Group of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication at AEJMC’s 2023 national conference in Washington, D.C. A revised, peer-reviewed version of the paper was published in June 2024 in Community Journalism, an open-access journal published by COMJIG and housed at the Texas Center for Community Journalism. As well, Aashish, Mario, and I developed a website to graphically illustrate our findings.
International Work
I have long loved teaching. My first full-time classroom assignment was as a Peace Corps volunteer in Bulgaria from 1991 to 1993. I taught English as a Foreign Language at the Vasil Drumev High School for Mathematics and Natural Sciences in Veliko Tarnovo, an ancient city in central Bulgaria where I also built a 300-volume English language library at the school, guest-lectured on American literature at St. Cyril and St. Methodius University of Veliko Tarnovo, and wrote an 18,000-word culture guide for future Peace Corps volunteers, Bulgaria: Land of Yogurt and Honey.
Since Bulgaria’s accession to the European Union in 2007, I have been working on a personal photographic project to document everyday Bulgarians going about their daily lives with quiet dignity and resilience, despite years of financial hardship following the end of communist rule in 1989. I was most recently in country in July 2025.
Major Stories and Documentary Coverage
Reporting for the Herald, I covered any number of major stories, from the 2001 World Trade Center terrorist attacks and their long aftermath to the crashes of flights 800 and 587, Tropical Storm Irene and Superstorm Sandy, the 2008 and 2012 presidential debates at Hofstra, the coronavirus pandemic, and the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 following the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
My LIHerald.com videography of the BLM protests, which garnered tens of millions of views on social media, was shown on several nationally televised programs, including CBS Sunday Morning, CBS News, Where Do We Go From Here? on OWN (Oprah Winfrey Network), and Kids, Race and Unity on Nickelodeon, as well as featured in Google’s Year in Search 2020 and reported on by outlets from Newsday to Business Insider,among others around the globe.
Additionally, freelancing for The New York Times and Newsday, I covered a range of stories in Nassau, Suffolk and Queens counties, from personal profiles to section covers.
Most recently for The Advocate, I have focused on a long-term investigation into wage theft in the restaurant industry with Hofstra’s reporting partner, WABC Eyewitness News.
Investigative Work and Impact
Among the Herald stories that I am most proud of producing is a 44-part, 60,000-word investigative series, An Epic Power Struggle, about the Village of Freeport’s Power Plant No. 2, a diesel facility with no pollution controls that failed to meet Clean Air Act regulations, and that threatened the environment and people’s health.
The series, the majority of which was published between 2001 and 2003, spurred hundreds of local residents to protest the plant’s continued operation, and then State Sen. Charles Fuschillo Jr. and Gov. George Pataki to shut it down in 2002. Freeport replaced it in 2005 with a $50 million natural gas plant that abided by all federal and state emissions requirements.
Thereafter, I produced at least one in-depth series annually for the Herald, examining subjects ranging from transportation infrastructure to heroin addiction, systemic racism and storm recovery.
Among my most challenging assignments was covering Hurricane Sandy in 2012 and 2013, because a third of my home was destroyed in the storm, and I was left without power, heat or hot water for weeks, while I was also reporting for the Herald on the devastation across Nassau County’s South Shore. Later, with my Herald colleagues, I took on an in-depth series of stories examining the Federal Emergency Management’s response to storm recovery.
Awards and Professional Recognition
I am honored and humbled to have been inducted into the inaugural class of the Press Club of Long Island Hall of Fame, and I have earned nearly 140 national, state and regional press association awards, including New York Press Association Writer of the Year and Sports Writer of the Year and PCLI Outstanding Long Island Journalist accolades. I am a 15-time winner of NYPA’s Sharon R. Fulmer Community Leadership Award, among the association’s highest honors.
As well, in my five-plus years as executive editor of Herald Community Newspapers, from 2016 to 2022, our newsroom garnered more than 120 NYPA and PCLI honors, including for General Excellence, Community Leadership, and Investigative Reporting, among many others. We annually ranked among the top two to four community news groups in the NYPA competition in those years.
As a journalist, I’ve covered a wide array of stories, from the World Trade Center terrorist attacks and their long aftermath to the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 following the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
In short, I am a storyteller, chronicling the lives of everyday people in their communities—the unsung heroes, the discontented citizens, the victims of the powerful seeking personal profit through nefarious means. I seek to tell the under-reported and unreported stories. It is a privilege and an honor to be invited into people’s homes, their schools, their houses of worship to document their worries, hopes and dreams—their lives.
For more, check out my LinkedIn page here.
