RiverheadLOCAL was honored with two awards for work on in-depth stories it produced in 2024 at the New York Press Association’s spring convention held in Saratoga Springs last week.
Denise Civiletti’s “Tin City: The story of Riverhead’s forgotten slums” (Feb. 29, 2024) won a first-place award in the feature story category. The piece explored the little-known history of a place called “Tin City” by some locals in the 1950s and ‘60s.
Today the site of the Indian Island County Park, the Hollis V. Warner Duck Ranch was then home to some 900 people, most of whom were Black migrant workers from the south. They lived in converted duck sheds and other uninsulated shacks, some less than 100 square feet, and in cramped apartments within large duck-brooder buildings that had been divided into makeshift multiple dwellings. They were, as journalists put it at the time, “the forgotten people” — “slaves for rent.”
Living conditions on the Warner property drew scrutiny and outrage after a spate of deadly fires in Riverhead slums over a five-year period killed 11 people, including five residents on the Warner property.
In the decades that followed the people who lived there were once again largely forgotten until brought to life again in this award-winning story.
Freedom of Information Award for reporting on ‘Agritourism Resorts’ issues
The website also won a second-place award in the Best Freedom of Information category for reporting by Alek Lewis and Denise Civiletti on the “Agritourism Resorts” code using the state’s Freedom of Information Law to track and obtain documents pertaining to the development of the proposal, a process that spanned months.
The submission consisted of two news articles and an editorial: “Developer helped town craft code change to make sound-front resort possible, records show” (Jan. 20, 2024), “Town Board majority agrees to axe agritourism resorts from Riverhead comp plan,” (Sept. 3, 2024) and “Facts are pesky things. Reporting them is our job.” (Feb. 6, 2024).
RiverheadLOCAL also won a third place award in the “Best Media Kit” category for the 2024 booklet, designed and produced by Courtney Blasl and Katie Morosky, showcasing the website’s analytics and audience data, advertising offerings and rates.
Civiletti named to New York Press Association Board of Directors
At the convention last week, Civiletti was named to the New York Press Association’s board of directors, becoming the first publisher of an online-only news publication to hold a seat on the board in the association’s history. RiverheadLOCAL was the first online-only news publication to become a member of the New York Press Association in 2014, when the organization opened membership to digital newspapers.
The New York Press Association was founded in 1853 to help publishers of small newspapers meet the needs of their communities.
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