Neil Steinberg

Neil Steinberg (born June 10, 1960) is an American news columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times and an author. He joined the paper's staff in 1987.

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. He has also written for web sites, including Salon and Forbes.com.

Steinberg was born to a Jewish family in Ohio and raised in Berea, Ohio. He moved to Chicago to attend Northwestern University from where he graduated in 1982 with a journalism degree.

Steinberg began his career working in Los Angeles in public relations. He returned to the Chicago area, where he freelanced and began his journalism career in Chicago's suburbs, working for the Barrington Courier-Review. 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.

Steinberg joined the Chicago Sun-Times in 1987. In 1996, after an extended paternity leave, he began writing three columns a week for the paper and serving on the paper's editorial board.

For two years starting in 1995, Steinberg wrote the "Bobwatch" column in the Chicago Reader alternative weekly newspaper, skewering the columns written by the Chicago Tribune's Bob Greene. He authored the column using the nom de plume Ed Gold, a name he also used for the Reader's "True Books" column. 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?"

In 2005, Steinberg began writing columns on the side for the New York Daily News.

After his arrest for domestic abuse in 2005, Steinberg was dropped from the Sun-Times' editorial board but added a fourth column per week.