My first job was going door to door in Suffolk County asking residents one question: Would you like to subscribe to Newsday?
Fast forward 30 years and I’m once again asking questions on behalf of Long Island’s daily paper, even occasionally knocking on doors.
I consider it a great privilege and responsibility to share these stories with Newsday readers and work tirelessly to find the cases most relevant to you.
My mother, a now-retired school teacher, claims I taught myself to read before entering kindergarten by fetching the paper from our yellow Newsday mailbox so I could learn about my beloved Mets.
When I was 7 years old, my dad, Pete Parpan, took a job in the art department at Newsday, designing ads for 22 years before retiring in 2008. I also had a cousin who worked many years on the printing press, and as a kid I’d visit them both at the former Newsday headquarters on Pinelawn Road.
That childhood experience, and a natural curiosity about how the world operates, inspired me to become a journalist – and I’ve since held nearly every type of job in a newsroom.
I began my journalism career covering sports in Southern California. When I moved back to Long Island three years later, I went to work as a reporter and editor for East End weeklies, spending the next 16 years covering everything from school boards to town meetings, business news and court cases. A former editor once referred to me as a “Swiss Army Knife of a journalist,” one heckuva headstone epitaph.
I’m proud to spend my 20th year in journalism with the newspaper whose stories educated me about the island I was raised on. Newsday also has afforded me my first opportunity to focus on a single beat: courts.
The stories that come out of the courthouses in Riverhead and Central Islip are among Newsday’s most read … and most sensitive. I consider it a great privilege and responsibility to share these stories with Newsday readers and work tirelessly to find the cases most relevant to you.
My door-to-door sales days may be a distant memory, but I’m thrilled to now be working with the talented Newsday journalists who always have made Long Island journalism worth paying for.
