Way back in the last century when I started college, I was a computer science and statistics major. Yeah, yeah, I know the jokes about journalists and math, but I was good at math then. No lie.



	I was doing all right, plowing along through Fortran and COBOL and other long-out-of-style programming languages, but not enjoying it much. It all seemed too secluded from the world at the time, walled off and fumbling with formulas.



	Though I couldn&rsquo;t put into words at the time, in hindsight I knew I wanted to be involved in something with more real interactions with people. Not to go Will Rogers on you, but I generally like most people and I&rsquo;m interested in their stories, their histories and what they&rsquo;re trying to do in the world.



	To make a long story medium, one day, with the encouragement of a college professor, I walked into the student newspaper offices and asked if I could help. I&rsquo;ve been in the news business more or less since. I began as a sportswriter in Louisiana, my home state. But I&rsquo;ve now worked in New York for three decades.



	I&rsquo;ve covered rodeos and high school football, a hostage standoff, a manhunt and too many political conventions. I&rsquo;ve written about corruption at your New York State Capitol, but I&rsquo;ve seen many touching moments there, too, like the joy of activists when same-sex marriage was legalized, and when adoptees were given access to their birth records.



	I&rsquo;ve spent the night on a newsroom floor waiting for a hurricane to roll in from the Gulf of Mexico, and flown in an airplane in Cuba where the seat instructions were in Russian and whose tires were so bald you could see steel belts. (It bounced three times on the landing, but made it.) My family likes the one about being on 15 flights in five days during a presidential campaign.



	I hope this doesn&rsquo;t sound like bragging, because it&rsquo;s not how I meant it. Besides, many journalists have had far more colorful adventures than I have.



	It&rsquo;s meant to be a roundabout way of saying newspapers and journalists strive to tell about how we live. Writing about big events, keeping you informed about important matters and sometimes surprising you. Life&rsquo;s rich pageant.



	We keep an eye on how politicians spend your money and what decisions affect your schools, businesses and daily lives. Sometimes, it means sifting through hype and hysteria to get to the bottom of claims. Sometimes, it means finding malfeasance.



	Knowing reporters are monitoring them (officials) does make a difference. But we also tell stories about the new restaurant or brew pub in the village, the candidates for the Oscars, the latest eighth-grade test scores and, yes, bad accidents on the Long Island Expressway.



	And writing local obituary stories about Long Islanders, which, believe or not, can be one of the more fascinating assignments. You have to talk to relatives at a very bad time, but you give them space to tell a person&rsquo;s story, and that can be enlightening and heartening for the family and the writer. I know: I&rsquo;ve delivered two eulogies myself.

Yancey Roy

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Newsday Journalists: Yancey Roy

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I started writing about sports when I was 10 years old, and I haven&rsquo;t stopped since. My passion and enthusiasm for sports writing remain as strong now as they were then. I still enjoy seeing my byline and having the opportunity to tell the stories of Long Island&rsquo;s high school athletes.



	As an athlete myself, I learned at a young age how meaningful it was to have my name appear in the pages of Newsday. I played baseball, football and was on the bowling team at Newfield High School back in the &rsquo;70s. I then went on to play baseball at Dowling College.



	I also learned another valuable lesson back then that I have carried with me throughout my 38-year career at Newsday &ndash; spell people&rsquo;s names right!



	Believe it or not, it&rsquo;s not as easy as you may think. My name, a little tricky but not difficult to spell, appeared in Newsday nine different ways over my high school and college career. Nine!



	I threw a no-hitter against Patchogue-Medford in high school and it appeared as George Sarra in the paper. That&rsquo;s my dad. One time, I threw a touchdown pass and one of my teammates got the credit. I hit two home runs in a game for Dowling, and they misspelled both my first and last name.



	It was so frustrating that my girlfriend at the time, Katherine (my wife for the past 34 years), wrote a letter to the sports editor to complain about the errors and misspellings.



	When I joined Newsday in 1985, I made it my mission to strive for accuracy and to spell every athlete&rsquo;s name right. While I can&rsquo;t say we&rsquo;re perfect, I can tell you it&rsquo;s not for a lack of effort.



	I love the excitement of high school sports, and I love telling stories. My favorite stories are the ones about athletes who have overcome incredible adversity, the people who don&rsquo;t let anything get between them and their dreams. A few have stood out over the years.



	One of the most inspirational stories was that of East Islip wrestler Rohan Murphy, who had no legs and reached the Suffolk County championship in 2001. He went on to wrestle at Penn State and is now a motivational speaker. Another is the story of Copiague High School&rsquo;s Amaya Williams, who played varsity basketball with two prosthetic limbs. Also, the story of the incredible bond between twin brothers Joey and Johnny Tardif, who were born seconds apart. Johnny was born a quadriplegic, and Joey became a high school baseball star who always took care of his brother.



	Just last year, I was able to tell the story of Long Beach wrestler Dunia Sibomana, who was disfigured in a chimpanzee attack in the Congo as a child. He came to Long Island and would go on to win the New York State wrestling championship. What a story. I look forward to writing more about Dunia in the future.



	I&rsquo;m proud of those inspirational stories, and they still bring a tear to my eye when I think about the trust each of those people showed in me.

Gregg Sarra

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Newsday Journalists: Gregg Sarra

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Sometime during my high school years in the 1970s in Center City, Philadelphia, teachers asked students to start thinking about careers. What did we want to do with our lives? I wasn&rsquo;t sure, though I thought it might have something to do with writing and researching. When I was 10 years old, I&rsquo;d written my own installment about Sinbad, the adventurous sailor, on an old typewriter my mother had &ndash; I wish I still had it! &ndash; in the long hours it took my mother to make the Thanksgiving Day meal for about a dozen guests. So, writing was a thing for me early on. Besides, I was intrigued by the journalism published in Ebony and Jet magazines focused on the lives of African Americans, from the serious stories about the aftermath of the Civil Rights Movement and other important historical moments to crowd-pleasing features about my celebrity favs.



	Long before &ldquo;Take Our Daughters to Work Day,&rdquo; my teachers required us to shadow our parents in their jobs during spring break, no less. I do remember I was in the ninth grade. So, instead of a having a week-long break of getting up early in the morning to take the commuter train into the city to go to school &ndash; I lived in the &lsquo;burbs &ndash; I went to the Philadelphia Navy Yard with my mother, who, during a 30-year-career as a federal government employee, worked at many government military installations throughout the city. After that one week of sitting in an office among largely humorless people, doing paperwork &ndash; my mother actually gave me assignments &ndash; I said, &ldquo;No, this is not for me.&rdquo;



	By the time I got to college, I had committed to studying journalism. I came to Newsday 30 years ago after working at newspapers in Danbury, Connecticut, and Richmond, Virginia. I&rsquo;ve covered a town, crime and courts, higher education and more. For three years, I was part of the Newsday investigative team that explored the role Long Island&rsquo;s real estate industry played in perpetuating housing discrimination here, one of the nation&rsquo;s most segregated regions. The result was the award-winning Long Island Divided series in 2019 that has led to changes in state law governing the training of real estate agents and greater enforcement of fair housing laws.

Olivia Winslow

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Intrigued by writing and researching at a young age, Olivia knew journalism was her calling. Thirty years later, she is a Newsday demographics reporter who delves deep to uncover the truth, drive change and champion issues that are important to the community.

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Newsday Journalists: Olivia Winslow

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On the latest episode of "Sarra Sounds Off," Newsday's Gregg Sarra talks to young people who are turning to game officiating as a new career path.

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Find out what's happening with Nassau & Suffolk news, Long Island schools, plus the latest crime, courts, politics. Coverage includes Fire Island, the Hamptons & North Fork.

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