Sonny Long

Sonny Long has been a newspaper reporter for more than 20 years, dabbled in radio announcing (including an 18-inning high school baseball playoff game), and is the co-author of “Bad News for McEnroe” (St. Martin’s Press 2004), and two independently published books, “A Long Look” -- a collection of poetry and short stories and a collection of newspaper columns.

He published "Among Murderers and Madness," a true crime account of a triple homicide in East Texas through CreateSpace in 2012. The book earned an honorable mention at the 2012 San Francisco Book Festival.

In his career, Long covered the opening ceremonies of the 1980 Winter in Olympics in Lake Placid and has met eight Heisman Trophy winners. While at Auburn University, where he graduated with a degree in journalism, Long worked in the school’s sports information office. He later worked in the Southeastern Conference Commissioners Office in the public information office.

Long has a masters degree from the University of Texas at Austin. After graduate school, he worked with Host Communications producing media guides and game programs for UT athletics.

Long later won an East Texas Press Association award for column writing while sports editor at the Atlanta Citizens-Journal. While in Atlanta, he operated the Pine Country Bulletin, a community newspaper in newsletter format from 1991-2005. Pine Country Media later included a four-color quarterly magazine and a regional news website, eTexasnews.com.

He is currently the senior reporter for the Victoria Advocate, a daily newspaper in South Texas, and has covered the trials of the Twilight Rapist, the murder of a Texas game warden and the starvation death of an eight-year-old girl.

At the Advocate, Long was part of a team of reporters that won a Texas Managing Editors award for coverage of a scent-dog controversy.

See more at www.sonnylong.com, Facebook and Twitter.