Eileen McNamara, Patch Staff

I was born and raised in Connecticut, with the exception of a brief stint in Vermont in the late 1960s when my dad decided to move my Mom back to her home state for a time. After graduating from Norwich Free Academy I took three years off from school to work and then went to college, first at Eastern Connecticut State University and then at UConn. I finished college in 1985 and immediately went to work for the Journal Inquirer, a daily newspaper in northcentral Connecticut. I covered towns, and later health care, for the JI, a still-independently owned newspaper that prided itself on its scrappiness and on trouncing the big-city paper, the Hartford Courant, on a regular basis. 

After seven years I moved on to The Day newspaper in New London. I worked there for 18 years in a variety of jobs, including covering communities, business and the issues related to the national story of emerging Native American tribes and the gaming enterprises they sought to develop. I worked for a time as the paper's enterprise reporter, doing longer, investigative pieces, and just before I left to come to Patch I was the paper's Custom Publications editor, overseeing the production of The Day's magazines and two of its weekly special sections, Home Source and Wheels.

I became an associated regional editor for Patch in December. 

I've lived in East Hampton since 1986 with my husband. We have two children, ages 23 and 16, and a really, really crazy dog we adopted two years ago from the local pound who has pretty much ruined all our living room furniture.

I love the news delivery business and believe deeply in the mission and purpose of the Fourth Estate. No democracy can thrive without an independent press. With the advent of the Internet and social media newspapers and other print media have seen a demoralizing decline in readership and community news has suffered greatly as a result. That's why I'm so happy to see the development of online local news sources like Patch. These hyper-local sites are filling the void left by the contraction of newspaper coverage in towns. 

My beliefs: I'm registered as a Democrat, but my voting record is all over the map. I don't much like sports (mostly because I think professional athletes are overpaid and spoiled) but I'll follow UConn basketball and football. I love dogs and we've adopted two in the last 10 years.  Our most recent one was found wandering in a wooded area, the victim, we believe, of abandonment. He's crazy and has ruined my living room furniture because my family and I lack the fortitude to make him stay off the couch and big comfy club chair.