About Steve
Steve Kastenbaum is an award-winning journalist with three decades of experience breaking news, crafting long-form and in-depth reports, and sharing human interest stories on deadline everywhere from the streets of New York to the presidential campaign trail to 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. He filed breaking reports and developed features on stories of the day and major events such as the September 11 terrorist attacks, the war in Afghanistan, the 2003 blackout, the murder of a New York City councilmember at City Hall, and the 2004 Republican National 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 multi-platform journalist, delivering on-scene radio, Web and television reporting from across the United States and around the world. Steve landed in Haiti 24 hours after the devastating earthquake in 2010, reporting as aftershocks shook Port-au-Prince and rescuers searched the rubble for survivors. The following year he was on scene in Japan after a destructive earthquake and tsunami wiped out coastal villages and caused a nuclear reactor meltdown. He earned several awards for this coverage including the 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, Connecticut 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 reported for a national audience as Barack Obama became the first Black President of the United States. As tear gas and flash grenades filled the streets of Ferguson, Missouri in August of 2014 during protests following the police shooting death of Michael Brown, he reported live on a nightly basis from the scene on CNN and CNN-I. He broke exclusive stories while lead producer of CNN’s coverage of the Bridgegate scandal. Steve has explored stories spanning the spectrum of the 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.
In 2014, Steve took his expertise to Westwood One News to be New York Bureau Chief and a senior correspondent for the national radio news network. He hit the campaign trail in 2016 and 2020 to provide in-depth coverage of the presidential elections, including reports from Donald Trump’s election night headquarters in 2016. He brought the thrill of competition to national and local radio audiences with reports from the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro and the 2018 Olympics in PyeongChang, South Korea. From his position in Brooklyn, New York, he gave audiences a unique view of the unfolding coronavirus pandemic, providing first-hand, emotional accounts of the crisis at local hospitals and the impact on the city’s sheltering population. When Black Lives Matter protests unfolded in May and June of 2020, he reported on the marches that engulfed the city and the demonstrations at the Barclays Center.
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 and a part-time reporter for NY1 News. He began his broadcast career in 1989 as a disc jockey for 92.7FM WDRE in Long Island, NY, playing bands like The Clash, REM and U2. In his free time, Steve is an avid runner and plays guitar. He lives in Brooklyn, with his wife and two sons.