Thursday, October 1, 2026
As the Nassau Herald marks its centennial, I hope to light at least one candle on the birthday cake. I have been opinionator-in-residence for over four decades, in addition to my duties as editor for many years. That would be roughly 2,236 columns.
A while ago I reconciled to the fact that when you write a column for 40-something years, some will be good, most will be good enough and some will miss the mark — any mark. And very occasionally, you hit one out of the park.
I have written every week, through the ’80s, ’90s and and up to today, commenting on the news and chronicling my kids’ school years, our family vacations in the wilds of Montana, the life and times of our dogs and the adventures of my good-natured husband, who has tolerated my writing about everything from his red golf pants to his ongoing fight with pancreatic cancer.
A longtime weekly column becomes a history of its time. I wrote in heavy black ink about the World Trade Center attacks, Hurricane Sandy, presidential elections, fashion trends, diets and riots, and with a finer-tipped pen I wrote about my family, eventually including eulogies for my mother and father and more than one friend.
My column has been my space to figure out what I think about this world and how to be a good neighbor in our community. I’ve tried to use my 750 words each week to promote serious debate. My outlook, supporting diversity and women’s rights, reflects what I believe. Not everyone agrees, and I have the letters to prove it. In recent years, some have gotten ugly, like so much dark current flowing through our media.
I can recall, at the beginning of my newspaper career, cutting and pasting printed stories on boards, each one a page of the paper. If the story didn’t fit, you just cut a paragraph or two from the bottom. Thus the importance of the first sentence or two, known as the lede, and the first three paragraphs, which basically told the story.
I was hired away from the late South Shore Record, owned by the indomitable Florence Schwartzberg, by Leatrice Spanierman, the Herald’s brilliant editor in chief and a natural news writer. Leatrice was socially, intellectually and emotionally intertwined with the Herald brand. We turned out big local papers in those days at our Lawrence headquarters. Our team wrote 10 to 20 local stories every week, and our motto was, “Everything that happens anywhere in the world has a Five Towns angle.”
And it was true. If a ship hit an iceberg in Antarctica, for sure there was someone who knew someone on board. This is all to say that local newspapers are essential to a functioning democracy, and I am grateful to have enjoyed this golden age of local journalism. This is also to say that across the country, small papers are closing. The loss of a reliable local news source has many consequences for a community. One is the inability to monitor the actions of government agencies and elected officials.
Subscribe to and read and advertise in our papers. We need to mind what’s going on in our schools, and to do that we need reporters to monitor the board meetings, and to do that we need to pay them.
Local papers cover everything from potholes to parades. The obituaries are their guiding light, reflecting a community’s past, reminding us of the special ties that bind friends and neighbors together.
When you wanted the scoop on how the blizzards of 2026 affected our schools and roadways, you read about it in the Herald. Wonder why the athletic fields at Lawrence High School are still closed? Want to know what Peter King said about “bipartisanship”? Do you know which Long Beach native won gold at the Olympics? Open the Herald. If you have property tax grievances or worry about the electric grid in your area, read the Herald and find the facts you need to better understand the issues facing Long Islanders now.
The dailies look at news through a wide-angle lens; our focus is narrow.
I love being a part of this news-gathering and opinion-formulating enterprise. From my perch, I focus inward, on family and life issues, and sometimes outward, on the political and social forces that unite and divide us.
It’s a wonderful job, getting to tell the ongoing story of our American democracy.
Copyright 2026 Randi Kreiss. Randi can be reached at randik3@aol.com.
