Business

Press Club of Long Island names News-Review staffer ‘Cub Reporter of the Year’

News-Review staff writer Kelly Zegers has been named the James Murphy Cub Reporter of the Year by the Press Club of Long Island.

PCLI, the Long Island chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists, has also announced that it will award the Northforker Long Island Wine Press Best Magazine and The Suffolk Times as Best Community Weekly Newspaper.

“Knowing just how many community news publishers are producing high quality work across Long Island, we hold this honor in very high regard,” said Times Review Media Group publisher Andrew Olsen. “We’re particularly pleased to be recognized for the work we do as both a weekly newspaper and a magazine publisher.”

The Suffolk Times has been covering the North Fork of Long Island since 1857. The Long Island Wine Press was launched as a partnership with the Long Island Wine Council in 1992.

Times Review Media Group has made an effort in recent years to expand its portfolio of magazines, making Wine Press a quarterly publication and introducing a new Northforker magazine earlier this year. The next issue of each publication hits East End newsstands in June.

“We’ve made a significant investment in the Long Island Wine Press and it’s so great to be recognized for that,” said Wine Press editor Vera Chinese. “This is a credit to the hard work of staff and all our talented freelance writers, photographers and designers.”

Cub reporter Kelly Zegers, 23, joined the Times Review staff in November 2016, covering local government and other general assignment stories.

Kelly Zegers

A 2016 graduate of Stony Brook University with degrees in both journalism and political science, the Selden resident previously interned at Newsday and worked as a general assignment reporter for The Southampton Press.

“Kelly is a tenacious reporter who aims to get to the bottom of every story she tells,” said Times Review managing editor Jen Nuzzo, a fellow Stony Brook graduate and past PCLI Cub Reporter of the Year. “She embodies the passion the instructors at the Stony Brook J-School instill in each student.”

The awards will be presented at PCLI’s annual dinner at Woodbury Country Club on Wednesday, June 7. Also being honored that evening with induction into the Long Island Journalism Hall of Fame is legendary columnist Jimmy Breslin of Newsday, the New York Daily News and the Long Island Press. He’ll be posthumously inducted alongside longtime East Hampton Star publisher Helen Rattray and former PCLI president Carl Corry.

Newsday was also awarded the Robert W. Greene Public Service Award for its “investigative series on the systemic flaws in Long Island’s judicial system that have allowed hundreds of cases to be sealed from public view despite regulations designed to make the courts more transparent,” according to PCLI.

More awards finalists will be announced in the coming days with the complete list of winners being named at the June 7 event.