Congratulations to Davis Park columnist Lisa Daglian for her win of a Press Club Long Island (PCLI) Media Award at the PCLI Media Awards Annual Banquet, held at Fox Hollow in Woodbury on June 5th.
Lisa has been a community columnist with Fire Island News since 2023, and like most community columnists, she takes on additional reporting assignments when needed. Her June 2024 article, Take the Train This Summer, The More Relaxing Way to Get to Fire Island, scored her third place in the Narrative Travel category. As Executive Director of the Permanent Citizens Advisory Committee to the MTA we knew she had the skillset to approach this subject with knowledge and skill.
” [An] effective piece that captures the message of representatives at the event,” read PCLI’s post-award notes the next day.
Daglian is a lifelong summer resident of Davis Park, and her love for the community resonates clearly in every community column she writes. She was the child of Davis Park groupers who had turned homeowners and had been summering there since infancy. Her father served as the chief of the Davis Park Fire Department (DPFD), and her husband, Fil, is presently the DPFD First Assistant Chief. She is also one of the directors of the Davis Park Association, and she, with her husband, helps coordinate the community’s 4th of July parade.
Lisa brought home the only PCLI award for Fire Island News this year. Still, we do share a small part in other honors, as longtime FIN contributor Timothy Bolger was inducted into the Long Island Journalist Hall of Fame that evening. Bolger is Editor-in-Chief of Long Island Press and Dan’s Papers, now FIN’s sister papers with Schneps Media, this recognition is largely due to his achievements within these forums. However, Bolger had his start reporting for Fire Island News back in 2008. His love of Fire Island and FIN kept him contributing articles even as he was climbing the ranks with these prestigious Long Island publications over the years. He still occasionally finds the time to contribute articles.
Earlier this spring it was announced that Bolger won a First Place New York Press Association (NYPA) Better Newspaper Award in Local News category for his 2024 article, Bellport’s Ho-Hum Residency Restriction. Bolger ashes this award with FIN writers Linda Leuzzi, Skylar Epstein for their local news coverage in 2024. Epstein has been with FIN since 2023, after graduating from George Washington University. He will pursue his law degree at St. John’s University this fall. Leuzzi also joined us that same year as a veteran Long Island journalist, published author, and former editor of the Long Island Advance. In May, Leuzzi, with her husband Vincent, were named Rollstone Foundation honoree recipients.
Leuzzi also won second place with NYPA in the Profile category for her exclusive interview with Bellport resident and Conclave Academy Award–nominated actress Isabella Rossellini in the December 2024 edition of Great South Bay News (GSBN). The interview was published just two months after GSBN was launched as a standalone publication, marking it the first journalism award for the monthly news magazine.
Finally, Shoshanna McCollum, editor-in-chief of both the FIN and GSBN news magazines brought home a third-place award in the Crime Reporting division for her series on the David Ostrove trial and sentencing in 2024. While this embezzlement-and-money-laundering case was a regional news story on Long Island, it held a certain interest locally, as Ostrove made several Fire Island-based real estate investments with stolen funds — this provided McCollum with a different angle than other local news sources.
PCLI is a chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists. It is devoted to protecting and advocating for First Amendment rights, furthering ethical standards and providing ongoing training for members. Both PCLI and NYPA members compete against their peers in the annual contest on a regional and statewide basis. The contest groups papers of similar size and compares them with one another in categories such as news, photography, and advertising.
