Colin Stephenson

After my freshman year in college, I decided I wanted to become a sportswriter. I started at Rutgers University with the intention of majoring in computer science, but I got Cs in my computer classes and As in my writing classes. I thought maybe I would be better off writing stories than trying to write computer programs.

I loved reading all the sports coverage from all the daily papers in New York and New Jersey (where I’m from), so being a sportswriter seemed like the best idea. Hockey was a big deal at the time – the Islanders were in the midst of their dynasty – so I wanted to write about hockey.

Good sports writing is all about tapping into people’s passion for sports, and giving them the content they need and crave for about their teams.

I transferred to St. John’s University and changed my major to journalism. I worked at the St. John’s student paper, The Torch, and was the sports editor when the men’s basketball team made the NCAA Final Four in 1985. I became the first Black editor-in-chief of the paper, and served as editorial page editor as well.

After graduation, I started my career with a summer internship at a small paper in Bridgewater, New Jersey. That eventually became a full-time job covering local news, and after a year-and-a-half, I switched to sports, covering high schools. Not long after that, I got my first pro sports job, covering hockey for The Asbury Park Press, and from there I went to the Daily News, where I covered the Islanders, and on to The Star-Ledger in Newark, New Jersey, where I covered college basketball and did some general assignment sports reporting. I joined Newsday in 2018 to cover the Rangers.

Good sports writing is all about tapping into people’s passion for sports, and giving them the content they need and crave for about their teams. Newsday always has been a leader in providing accurate, thoughtful coverage of Long Islanders’ favorite sports teams, and when I came on board, I became part of one of the best teams of sports journalists in the business.