E-mail: corey@patch.com
Phone: 860-478-0907 Hometown: Stonington, CT Birthday: April 26 Bio: Corey Fyke was born in Lewiston, Maine, when the No. 1 song on the Billboard charts was, appropriately for his parents, Roberta Flack's "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face." As the eldest child of a Navy man and a housewife (they call them stay-at-home moms now), he moved around in his youth (Newport, Maine, Virginia, Spain, Maine again) before settling, finally, in Stonington, CT, for good in 1982. After holding some super-interesting-yet-ignominious minimum-wage jobs (janitor at a private yacht club, dishwasher, fish-fryer, t-shirt hawker -- he once even dressed in a turkey costume to waive people into a real estate open house), Corey graduated from Stonington High School, then attended Southern Connecticut State University and earned a bachelor's degree in journalism while working part-time at the Connecticut Post and New Haven Register. He also learned during these years that sleep is overrated, the need to exercise is not, and that he wasn't cut out to work in a frozen-foods warehouse. After his freshman year at Southern, Bill Thorndike, now the Ledyard, CT, Patch Editor, gave him the best journalism education a fresh-faced country boy could have asked for by hiring him to be the reporter (sports, news, features ... everything) for a weekly community newspaper he was starting up in Mystic, CT, called the Mystic River Press, even forcing him to deliver it to convenience stores, libraries and kiosks countywide. Corey was so integral to the sprawling 700-square-foot operation that Bill even advanced him some money to buy a rusted-out 1981 Toyota Corolla when his car died. Corey earned the ultimate impractical graduate degree, a master's in English Literature, at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, then worked for a time in Information Security at Capital One doing network security when the Internet was basically just AOL, CompuServe and a loose collection of crudely coded, eye-stabbing websites. The pull of the Nutmeg State was too strong, though, and he took a job doing marketing for a family-owned steel company headquartered in North Haven, CT. Five years later, just when he thought he was out, journalism pulled him back in, this time to be the Assistant Copy Chief at The Day in New London, CT. During his time in New London, Corey also served in roles such as Associate Online Editor, Night City Editor and (here's the glorious one) Web Technician. In June, he was bitten by the Patch bug, and was hired to be the Regional Editor for 12 Patch sites in central Connecticut encompassing the cities of Meriden and Middletown and the towns of Berlin, Rocky Hill, Cromwell, Glastonbury, Marlborough, Hebron, Colchester, Portland, East Hampton, Haddam, East Haddam, Durham, Middlefield, Killingworth, Deep River, Chester and Essex. Corey lives in Stonington with his wife, three children, several hundred relatives by marriage and unsustainable mortgage payment. He is excited to wake up every day as part of an organization that is helping to define the future of community journalism and forging a digital gathering place for the exchange of news and ideas.