Tony Insolia (1926-2024), Long Island Journalism Hall of Fame Class of 2026
Posted on May. 24, 2026 / Subscribe 0
Anthony E. Insolia was a newspaperman during the heyday of newspapers.
After serving in the U.S. Army as a staff sergeant in occupied Germany in 1945 and 1946, he went to college on the GI Bill, and upon graduation from New York University began his career in journalism. For 32 years, he worked at Newsday, first as a reporter, ultimately as the editor, and in between in almost every job the newsroom had to offer. He led teams that won seven Pulitzer prizes.
One of his proudest professional achievements was The Arizona Project, a unique collaborative journalistic effort that investigated the murder of Don Bolles, an Arizona investigative reporter, in 1977. After seven months of reporting that uncovered links between state corruption and organized crime, Tony flew to Phoenix to help organize the information into a series, and then edit the project.
He took Newsday into the technology age in the 1970s, helping to introduce computers into the operation.
“Tony gave a whole generation of young editors and reporters a chance to make Newsday a great paper, winning multiple Pulitzer prizes and letting us take chances and move the paper forward from its already strong roots,” Phyllis Singer, a retired features editor, told Newsday recently.
While he took his job very seriously, he never took himself that way. He was an incorrigible practical joker with a robust sense of humor, but he was quick to laugh at himself, as well. He had a deep well of witticisms, many of which are too colorful to print in a family newspaper. His signature line was “Nobody’s perfect. I think I made a mistake once.”
Tony came from humble beginnings. His father emigrated from Sicily when he was 18 years old, and became a presser in the garment industry. His mother was first generation Italian, and worked as a seamstress. As the oldest of four children raised during the Great Depression, Tony could recall numerous occasions when his family couldn’t pay the rent or utility bills. Starting when he was 13, he worked shining shoes and selling newspapers, and all the money he made went to his mother to help pay the bills.
Whatever job he did, he gave it his best effort, but he persisted in his goal to be a writer by revisiting editors he had interviewed with despite the fact that they hadn’t offered him a job. Thus he moved quickly from small operations like the Yonkers Times and Park Row News Service to the Stamford Advocate and then Newsday, the paper that held his interest and challenged him for more than three decades.
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