14 LONGISLANDPRESS.COM • SEPTEMBER 2017 14 LONGISLANDPRESS.COM • SEPTEMBER 2017 14 LONGISLANDPRESS.COM • SEPTEMBER 201TUTU111
Hey. Good to see you. It’s been
awhile.
Since March 2014, in fact. You
remember it, maybe. Malaysian
Airlines 370 gone missing. Russia
annexing Crimea. North Korea
with the missiles already. Lady
Gaga in concert, belting “Swine”
from atop a roasting pig.
And the last print issue of the Long
Island Press – the last one before
this one, that is. Local-born “Saturday
Night Live” alum Jim Breuer on
the cover, drinking coffee with our
guy in Chester, N.J. Inside, there
was an update on Oheka’s Gary
Melius, shot but surviving, and a
few pages back the horoscope predicted
I’d enjoy love and affection
during my “Uranus transit.”
That was not the original Press,
of course, once the crown jewel of
the Newhouse newspaper chain
and a beloved first job for everyone
from celebrity detective Bo Dietl
to TV news personality Geraldo
Rivera, who delivered the paper as a
12-year-old Babylon resident.
“Aside from the fact that it taught
me business, costs and profits, the
thing that I really loved was you
got tickets to Yankee Stadium and
the Steeplechase at Coney Island,”
Rivera said. “So the Long Island
Press really was an eye-opening
experience for me. It’s still a big
part of my nostalgic recollections of
life on Long Island.”
Though a Queens publication by
birth – it dates back to the 1800s –
the Press followed the post-World
War II building boom into Nassau
and Suffolk counties and by the late
1960s had a commanding circulation
of 450,000.
“The Sunday paper was so thick I
had to reload my bike four times to
deliver my route,” remembers John
Culbertson, a Press carrier in the
1960s and now president of tech
firm IPLAN Access.
The picture had changed dramatically
by the 1970s. Newsday had
emerged as the Island’s leading daily,
in both readership and advertising
space. The 1973 recession shut
down some local businesses and
forced others to cut back on their
advertising.
The Press lost money for three
years running before Newhouse
decided to pull the plug. By then,
circulation was down to fewer than
250,000 copies. The news appeared
in the edition of March 25, 1977.
“Today’s issue is the last,” the headline
read.
The layoffs totaled 600. The Press
building, a giant brick shrine to
newspapering built on 168th Street
in the 1930s, remained idle until
it was torn down in 2005 to make
room for a Home Depot.
The Press was reborn in 2003 by
Jed Morey, whose father owned the
legendary alternative rock station
WLIR. The initial idea was to create
a weekly music-focused paper to
complement the station and its varied
events, “an alt-weekly with suburban
sensibilities,” he has called it.
Jed’s dad sold WLIR a year later,
but the new Press charged forward
without it, mixing entertainment
with investigative reporting and
political coverage and generally
calling out anyone who would
mess with anything Long Island.
The staff was a quirky but talented
bunch, mostly former Long Island
Voice writers, led by the creatively
restless Robbie Woliver.
While the awards stacked up, the
checks didn’t, and the weekly Press
was forced into monthly frequency
in 2013. The Press has soldiered on
as an all-digital publication since
2014, serving up a few million page
views per year. Still no stacks of
checks, though.
Which brings us to the issue you’re
holding. Josh and Vicki Schneps,
owners of 20 or so papers in the
NYC boroughs, acquired the Press
in April and almost immediately set
about bringing it back to print. The
plan: a monthly trends and lifestyle
publication fronted by some of the
nowhere-else journalism that has
won the Press so many awards over
the years. They hired me to help.
There. You’re pretty much up to
date.
We’re happy to have longtime
staffer Tim Bolger as editor, plus a
talented group of contributors, old
and new, in our return to print. A
favor, from you, though. We have
more ideas than pages at this point,
and building the new Press, perfecting
its voice and content, will
take time. Please stick around.
Tell me how we’re doing any time at
jkominicki@longislandpress.com.
– John Kominicki
OPENING LINES
We’re back. Again.
