Olivia Winslow

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’t sure, though I thought it might have something to do with writing and researching. When I was 10 years old, I’d written my own installment about Sinbad, the adventurous sailor, on an old typewriter my mother had – I wish I still had it! – 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 “Take Our Daughters to Work Day,” 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 – I lived in the ‘burbs – 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 – my mother actually gave me assignments – I said, “No, this is not for me.”

By the time I got to college, I had committed to studying journalism.

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’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’s real estate industry played in perpetuating housing discrimination here, one of the nation’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.