Steve Kastenbaum

Steve Kastenbaum is an award-winning journalist, with two decades of experience breaking news, crafting long-form and in-depth reports and sharing human stories on deadline everywhere from the streets of New York to the presidential campaign trail and disaster zones worldwide.

The native Brooklynite began his reporting career at New York’s 1010 WINS Radio, the nation’s most listened-to all-news radio station, filing breaking reports and features on everything from the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and the war in Afghanistan to the 2003 blackout, the murder of a New York City councilmember at City Hall and the 2004 Republican Convention. He also explored the impact of wide-scale education reform on classrooms for an award-winning year long series after New York’s mayor won control of the nation’s largest public school system.

As a New York-based national radio correspondent for CNN, he became a fully-fledged multiplatform journalist, delivering on-scene radio, Web and television reporting from across the United States and around the globe. He reported from Haiti and Japan after devastating earthquakes as aftershocks rumbled, and rescuers searched the rubble for survivors — earning several awards including the Sigma Delta Chi Award for Breaking News Reporting from the Society of Professional Journalists.

Closer to home, he reported from Nevada and California as wildfires raged, from Newtown as the community struggled to make sense of the horrific school shooting in that town, and from the presidential campaign trail and party conventions as the nation was gripped by two heated races in 2008 and 2012. He has explored stories spanning the spectrum of human experience, such as the way a police officer’s brain reacts to a life-or-death faceoff and the struggle of a young woman to become the first female African-American chess master.

His reporting has earned more than a dozen local and national awards, including the 2013 Edward R. Murrow Award for Reporting: Hard News for the story When police shoot and the 2013 Edward R. Murrow Award for Best Use Of Sound for the story Saturday Night Fever’s Brooklyn legacy.

He has also worked as a New York-based stringer for both the Associated Press and ABC Radio. He began his broadcast career in 1989 as a disc jockey for 92.7FM WDRE in Long Island, N.Y., playing bands like The Clash, REM and U2. In his free time, Steve runs halfmarathons and plays guitar. He lives in Brooklyn, with his wife and two sons.