Mark Harrington

I started at Newsday 24 years ago, initially working as a technology reporter and columnist. Born in Queens, I grew up in Bay Shore, graduated from Islip High School, and spent college years upstate and in California, where I earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism from San Diego State University.

For most of my career at Newsday I’ve covered the energy beat, but my work has led me to other regular areas of coverage, including agriculture and Long Island’s wineries, Indian Nations, and fisheries. After spending my early teens delivering Newsday in my Bay Shore neighborhood, I worked summers as a clammer, a pool builder and boat-yard hand. I once flipped a dump truck full of concrete onto a Great Neck lawn, raked clams on the Great South Bay, and climbed steel-bar walls as an ironworker— all before I left college.

I’ve always been energized by the passion and bravery of the people who take risks to tell us their stories — about misdeeds, inconceivable truths, and hidden conflicts.

Many of my journalism heroes were institutions at Newsday before I arrived, and some were here when I joined — columnists like Jimmy Breslin and consumer watchdog Henry Gilgoff, international reporters like Tina Susman and Letta Taylor. My early work at Newsday took me around the world — to China to write about Charles Wang’s homeland, to London to cover subway bombings, to Belfast as the IRA was disarming, and to Sweden, where I tracked an American fugitive to a seaside village on the Baltic Sea.

I’ve always been energized by the passion and bravery of the people who take risks to tell us their stories — about misdeeds, inconceivable truths, and hidden conflicts. When there’s an absence of public information, journalists thrive on the mission to fill the void, to paint the full canvas. It was evident last year when a cyberattack shut down many Suffolk County government services, and information was scarce.

Reporters often get criticized for failing to cover the positive stories and focusing on the negative, but the criticism misses the point. On Long Island, there are often more than two sides to each story, some happy, some not. I feel obligated to give equal voice to as many of them as I can squeeze into 600 words. It’s not always easy, balancing that tension among opposing forces, but it’s central to the role of Newsday, and it’s the part of the job that’s most rewarding.