SEPTEMBER 2018 • LONGISLANDPRESS.COM 19
WHERE WE’RE GOING
bluff-fronted north shore at Jamesport
on the North Fork under the
guise of building a deep-water
port,” recalled Grossman, who is
pressing on after a half century in
the business. “In fact, it was a huge
sand mine, a massive rape of Long
Island. The sand was being barged
off to Connecticut to make concrete
for interstate highways being built
there. The scheme was stopped. The
land is now a state park.”
At its peak, the Press had a circulation
of more than 445,000 in 1969.
Many a Baby Boomer shares fond
memories of delivering the thick
broadsheet newspaper as their first
job.
Among them are TV news personality
Geraldo Rivera, who delivered
the Press as a 12-year-old Babylon
resident and credits one of the paper’s
carrier contests with opening up the
wide world he would later cover.
“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.”
But the good times didn’t last. By
1977, increased production costs,
decreased advertising revenue and a
healthy competition led the then-publisher,
Samuel I. Newhouse, to pull
the plug on the Press after 156 years
in business. It was the end of an era.
THE PRESENT
Twenty-six years later, Jed Morey,
whose family owned WLIR,
the famed alternative rock radio
station, revived the dormant title as
an alternative newsweekly. Rumors
flew that the Press would again go
daily, although it only did so online.
A decade later, the Press reduced its
publication to monthly, and a year
after that, in 2014, it went digital.
That is, until Victoria
Schneps-Yunis and her son,
Joshua Schneps, who co-own
a chain of newspapers in the
New York Metro area, reinvented
the Press and brought
it back to print last year. Samuel
Newhouse died a month
after his old paper rolled off
the presses. And three months
after that, John Kominicki,
the local journalism legend
who was hired as publisher to
lead the relaunch, joined Newhouse
at the big newsroom
in the sky.
THE FUTURE
Since then, the Press has
soldiered on, informing and
entertaining readers, keeping
the tradition alive, and breaking
news along the way. What does
the future look like for the Press and
its readers? Guess you’ll just have to
keep reading to find out.
name to the Long Island Daily
Press and Farmer.
1926: German newspaper
publishers the Ridder Brothers
purchase the paper, make
William F. Hoffman publisher
and shorten the name to the
Long Island Press.
1932: The Ridders sell the
Press to Samuel I. Newhouse,
the founder of Advance
Publications, which went on to
absorb various media outlets,
most notably the Condé Nast
Publications magazine group.
March 25, 1977: Newhouse
shuts down the Press amid
declining ad revenue, increasing
costs and boosted competition.
January, 2003: Jed Morey
of WLIR alternative radio
fame revives the title, which
Newhouse had abandoned 26
years prior, and turns it into a
free alternative newsweekly.
2013: The Press goes monthly
and a year later, online only.
April 2017: Victoria Schneps-
Yunis and her son, Joshua
Schneps, acquire the Press
from Morey and reinvent it as
a monthly news and lifestyle
publication in September of
that year.
The first issue of the Press
relaunch in September
2017.
Garden City’s Lara Spencer of
Flea Market Flip fame graced
the January 2018 cover.
Comic Jerry Seinfeld made us laugh for the August
2018 cover.
The Press helped expose the depths of the Long
Island heroin crisis in 2008.