Neil Steinberg (born June 10, 1960[1]) is an American news columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times and an author.
[2] Steinberg has written for a wide variety of publications, including Esquire, The Washington Post, The New York Times Sunday Magazine, Rolling Stone, Sports Illustrated, Details, Men's Journal, National Lampoon and Spy.
[6] He later wrote for the now-defunct Wheaton Daily Journal newspaper, but was fired after writing a column that made fun of the paper's publisher.
[7] After Greene was fired by the Tribune in 2002 for engaging in an inappropriate relationship with a high school girl who had come to his office to interview him for her school newspaper, Steinberg wrote an article for Salon.com in September 2002 that mocked Greene and concluded with the line "Who will we make fun of now?
[9] After his arrest for domestic abuse in 2005, Steinberg was dropped from the Sun-Times' editorial board but added a fourth column per week.
[11][12] Crain's Chicago Business reported that the move came after a controversial column by Steinberg that then-Sun-Times Editor Jim Kirk had criticized for reading like an ad for a car time-share company.
[16] In 2018, an advance obituary written by Steinberg about Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis briefly was erroneously published online due to a production glitch.
[4] In 2001, Steinberg reflected to the Chicago Reader on the art of writing obituaries of flawed individuals: "I did one of the Greylord judges' obits.
I would rather cheese off the few members of the family who are unredeemably biased than write some sort of pabulum they can put in their scrapbooks and is a trivialization of the truth."
(Steinberg almost surely was referring to his January 1997 obituary of a high-ranking Cook County judge in Operation Greylord, Richard F. LeFevour.
[22] Steinberg subsequently wrote about the arrest in the Sun-Times, writing that while drunk at his home in September, he had slapped his wife: "She called the cops, they came, clapped me into handcuffs and hauled me off to jail.
"[23] Steinberg responded by noting that "The difference between my past and hers is that I have done the hard work to change myself, while she remains exactly what she was, alas.