Robert Keeler probably knows more about Newsday than anyone at the newspaper. He literally wrote the book.

In 1990, he published, "Newsday: the Respectable Tabloid," an exhaustive study of the nation's largest suburban newspaper that took three years to complete.

When he finished, Keeler was given a much different assignment. He became the paper's religion writer. Almost immediately, Keeler shifted the focus of the beat from short stories on the latest parish controversy or theological trend to in-depth examinations of spirituality. That led to a series on St. Brigid's Catholic parish in Westbury. But as Keeler said in a short address to colleagues after winning the Pulitzer Prize for beat reporting, it was his experience as a young reporter covering the Town of Brookhaven that prepared him to tell the St. Brigid's story.

Keeler started at Newsday in 1971 and was sent to Brookhaven, where he covered board meetings and local politicians -- the basic stuff of town reporting. With an eye for detail and a penchant for organizing his work that borders on the compulsive, Keeler became a whiz at political journalism and was assigned the post of Albany bureau chief and later state news editor.

After his state duties, Keeler did a stint on the national desk and then took over the now defunct Newsday Sunday magazine. In a 1985 magazine story, Keeler movingly told of his younger brother, Richie, who died at the age of 35 after having been exposed to the chemical Agent Orange in Vietnam -- a piece that left little doubt that the author believed U.S. soldiers had likely been put in harm's way by their own country.

Keeler was no stranger to the military. He served as a U.S. Army first lieutenant in Korea and was stationed 30 miles south of the Demilitarized Zone. He was an intelligence officer and in that role managed classified documents. But Keeler had another task that proved more formative. He helped produce a monthly newsletter called the ``Missile Command News'' -- Keeler's introduction to journalism.

Coincidently, Keeler's co-editor at the "Command News," John R. Camp, won a Pulitzer Prize in 1986 for feature writing at the St. Paul Pioneer Press and Dispatch.

Keeler, who lives in Stony Brook and teaches a journalism course at the State University at Stony Brook, is a loyal Mets rooter -- from the minors to majors -- and an even more devoted fan of his wife, Judith, his two daughters, Rebekah and Rachel, and his grandaughter, Hailey.