National APEX “Public Awareness Social Media Campaign” Award For #LISoundFacts Comes A Month After Two Fair Media Council Folio Awards, Regional Prizes Bestowed to Sea Grant for #LISoundFacts and NY Coastlines, its flagship e-newsletter

Contact:

Paul C. Focazio, Communications Manager, New York Sea Grant, E: Paul.Focazio@stonybrook.edu, P: (631) 632-6910

Stony Brook, NY, July 15, 2025 - New York Sea Grant's #LISoundFacts campaign (www.nyseagrant.org/lisoundfacts) has received a 2024 APEX Award of Publications Excellence in the category of "Campaigns, Programs & Plans — Public Service."

This Public Awareness Award for the Long Island Sound Facts social media campaign — celebrating the work of Paul C. Focazio, NYSG's Communications Manager; Jimena Perez-Viscasillas, NYSG's Outreach Coordinator, Long Island Sound Study (LISS); Robert Burg, Communications Officer, LISS; Lucy Reading, graphic artist — is the second for the campaign, which also received a Folio Award in early June from the Fair Media Council (FMC) for best "Social Media Public Awareness Campaign", a regional honor.

Additionally, Focazio received a second honor at the 2024 Folio Awards, this one for "Best Newsletter by Nonprofit (Small)" in recognition of the program's flagship e-newsletter, NY Coastlines. 

This marks the fifth FMC Folio Award bestowed upon Focazio and his NYSG colleagues in the past decade (four of which have been for Best Public Awareness Campaign). Additionally, similar to #LISoundFacts, one of those campaigns, for #BEachSAFEly, also won a 2021 APEX Award for Publications Excellence.

More Info: NY Coastlines Award

At the 2024 Folio Awards, the Fair Media Council recognized Focazio's work as Editor of NYSG's e-newsletter, NY Coastlines (www.nyseagrant.org/nycoastlinesarchives), with the "Best Newsletter by Nonprofit (Small)" Award. In 2023, Focazio produced two issues of the e-newsletter: Late Spring'23 and Fall '23.

Through New York Sea Grant's five plus decades of efforts, the combined talents of university scientists and extension and education specialists help develop and transfer science-based information to many coastal user groups — businesses and industries, federal, state and local government decision-makers and agency managers, educators, the media and the interested public.

Since the late 1960s, NYSG's NY Coastlines newsletter has been highlighting the statewide coastal science program's various activities throughout New York's marine and Great Lakes waters. 

In 2012, the newsletter transitioned from being printed and mailed out to being fully e-distributed several times a year via Constant Contact, with two double issues released in 2023. The spring and fall issues, along with the rest of issues over the past 50 years, can be accessed at www.nyseagrant.org/nycoastlinesarchives. 

While there are numerous other methods that we reach out to New York residents — via our website and social media platforms, to name a few — it's our e-newsletter that shares many of the ways that our program directly impacts their lives. 

For example, the Spring 2023 issue included announcements that NYSG had received: (a) part of a larger $27M funding effort by NOAA to seek out community-based solutions to address marine plastics and other debris in our local waterways; (b) more than $6.3M for new research focusing on the health and safety of Long Island Sound marshes, water quality, public beaches and as well as ways to improve the conditions of the estuary for both humans and wildlife; (c) a $8.1M national investment to strengthen resilient coastal communities, which is bolstering ongoing community engagement efforts such as Community Flood Watch throughout NYC's boroughs as well as the statewide MyCoast NY, a downloadable app and web portal that provides residents with a way to locally document increasing flood risk and uncertainty.

Like with the other two new pots of funding highlighted, the key with resilience coastal communities support is to impress upon the reader that while catastrophic flooding associated with large storms like hurricanes gain great attention, people’s lives are often disrupted by the smaller, more frequent street-level floods that accompany high tides and high-intensity rain events. That's why projects we highlight in the e-newsletter such as MyCoast NY are so important, because they provide residents with tools to work towards addressing a serious, pervasive concern.

As highlighted in the Fall 2023 issue, our program also annually supports a number of fellowships that provide both undergraduate and graduate students with real-world opportunities, not only in laboratories and field studies but also policy and decision-making in U.S. House and Senate offices. One of these programs is the Knauss Marine Policy Fellowship, now in its 45th year. One recent fellow shares with NY Coastlines readers, "I have been a part of [a team] implementing the Ocean Climate Action Plan. Through this role I get to experience the full expanse of turning a set of initiatives into action, and the scale needed to ensure that multiple agencies function seamlessly to realize the efforts framed in policy." 

NY Coastlines is also a space to provide subscribers with a sense of optimism as we grapple with complex problems such as water quality in Long Island's bays. One of NYSG's funded researchers, Stony Brook University's Chris Gobler, puts it simply: "All of Long Island is a watershed. “Water is at the soul of Long Island, and all activity on land affects the aquifer beneath our feet. All of these things are intimately connected."

Throughout NYSG's many stories in NY Coastlines, it's important to translate science, but also to offer people ways in which they can best connect with us and their local waterways. The key is stewardship. And this is strengthened by offering virtual tours of what researchers are seeing in undersea habitats or providing hands-on teacher workshops at Sunken Meadow and other NYS parks or hosting seminars to show women how to fish in New York's Great Lakes waters. Our readers hold the key to our success, and NY Coastlines helps to unlock that potential. 



More Info: #LISoundFacts Awards

The strategy of the 22-week-long #LISoundFacts campaign was to provide the general public with scientifically proven concepts about the health of Long Island Sound (LIS) and its diverse habitat and wildlife. The goal was to increase awareness about the value of this estuary, one of 28 unique aquatic environments "where rivers meet the sea" that was nationally designated via an act of Congress in 1987.

The campaign, created by the Long Island Sound Study (LISS) and Sea Grant programs in New York (NYSG) and Connecticut (CTSG), launched in mid-July with posts on Facebook and Twitter that, beginning in early September, debuted as animated scenes exclusively on Instagram. A landing page for the still and animated posts across the three platforms can be found at www.nyseagrant.org/lisoundfacts.

To help best disseminate the scenes — which included messages on (a) how marine debris, invasive plants and animals, and toxic chemicals negatively impact marine life and habitats as well as (b) why the health of this aquatic environment is of such critical important to species such as horseshoe crabs, piping plovers, turtles, fish such as summer flounder, and, yes, even earthworms — we created partnership posts with existing social media campaigns, such as August's #DontTrashLISound and late September's #NationalEstuariesWeek. These posts focuses on, respectively, the "Top 10 Litter Items" collected on LIS Coastal Cleanup Days and "Why Are Wetlands So Vital?". 

We also used relatable imagery to get our point across to visitors, such as providing the fact that if the Statue of Liberty was dropped into the average depth of LIS (a shallow 63 feet), it would have 86 ft. exposed above the water. 

Results from recent scientific studies, such as those conducted by investigators at Stony Brook University's main campus as well as at its Southampton campus, were distilled to convey key findings in a digestible way, such as how sugar kelp, a native seaweed farmed for food and fertilizer, can help mitigate nutrient pollution in the Sound. An important fact that we landed on to impress upon those who came across the post was that strands of the seaweed can grow over 20 feet long between the late fall and the spring.

While topics such as climate change can be divisive with some audiences, we spelled out the concern for our local environment in a way that directly impacts those who live and work here — as waterbodies such as the Sound warms, fish populations are changing. For example, warm water fish like black sea bass are replacing cold water species such as winter flounder. As we cited, according to trawl survey data collected by the Connecticut Department of Energy & Environmental Protection (DEEP), "What has been observed is that the number of fish species with greater tolerance to warmer temperatures is increasing, while the number of fish species that prefer colder temperatures is declining." These changes create ecosystem shifts that, over time, can have severe impacts on both the environment and our economy.

The primary focus for this campaign was on Instagram, where some 4,100 people were reached, with the dozen 16-second animated #LISoundFacts scenes viewed 5,979 times, and posts receiving a total of 287 likes, comments, and shares. Still images of the scenes were shared earlier in the campaign on Facebook and Twitter. On Facebook, the total tally of all the times posts were seen (impressions) was 1,409, with a total of 186 engagements (likes, comments, and shares). On Twitter, there were 2,850 impressions and 113 engagements (likes, comments, retweets, and clicks).

On Instagram, shares of posts, among other engagements, came from a number of NYSG and LISS partners, including the National Sea Grant College Program as well as a variety of Sea Grant programs from across the U.S. (e.g., New Hampshire, North Carolina, South Carolina, Illinois-Indiana, Michigan, Texas) as well as line offices for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Sea Grant's parent agency. 

In addition to some of these partners who also engaged with posts on Instagram, others engaged with posts on Twitter and/or Facebook. 

Looking forward, LISS continues its #LISoundFacts series via its social media platforms and on its website.

More Info: Fair Media Council and Folio Awards

The 2024 Folio Awards were delivered during a ceremony hosted by the Fair Media Council (FMC) on June 7th at the Garden City Hotel. FMC is a Long Island nonprofit that advocates for quality news coverage and works to create a media-savvy society.

"With the media landscape so highly fragmented, it poses a serious challenge for the public to find credible news and information," said FMC CEO and Executive Director Jaci Clement. "Educating organizations on how to navigate today's media landscape is a priority of the Fair Media Council, and our Folio Awards program is a cornerstone of our work."

"Our unique judging process creates media-savvy consumers while ensuring the entries that become Folio Award winners represent the highest quality and most relevant works of news and social media. The prestige of winning a Fair Media Council Folio Award has turned it into the gold standard for the modern media landscape. Entries come from around the country."

In addition to winning its two awards — "Best Newsletter by Nonprofit (Small)" for NY Coastlines and "Best Public Awareness Campaign" for #LISoundFacts — NYSG was also featured in several media stories honored with separate Folio Awards.

WSHU FM won two awards for segments featuring NYSG: "Keeping track of coastal flooding data? There's an app for that" (April 2023) and Sound Science — a recent example: "Community conversations inspire WSHU's 'Sound Science' series" (October 2023).

More recently, WSHU featured NYSG's MyCoastNY project in a follow-up story filed in January 2024: "Eyes on the tides: How snapping a photo can help scientists plan for a changing coastline"

More Info: APEX Awards 

APEX 2024 is the 36th annual awards program in a series that recognizes excellence in publishing by professional communicators (corporate and nonprofit publishers, editors, writers and designers who create print, web, electronic and social media).

The APEX Awards are based on excellence in graphic design, editorial content, and the ability to achieve overall communications excellence. APEX Grand Awards honor the outstanding works in each main category, while APEX Awards of Excellence recognize exceptional entries in each of the individual sub-categories.

As Ken Turtoro, APEX Senior Judge and Communications Concepts, Inc. Executive Editor, said: "With over 1,100 entries, competition, as always, was exceptionally intense." 100 Grand Awards were presented to honor outstanding work in 13 major categories, with 439 Awards of Excellence recognizing exceptional entries in 100 sub-categories.

Turtoro joined a panel of judges for APEX 2024 that included: John De Lellis, Concepts Editor & Publisher; Christine Turner, Contributing Editor of the Writing That Works Archives; and Anne Gilio, Consulting Editor.


More Info: New York Sea Grant

Established in 1966, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)’s National Sea Grant College Program promotes the informed stewardship of coastal resources in 34 joint federal/state university-based programs in every U.S. coastal state (marine and Great Lakes) and Puerto Rico. The Sea Grant model has also inspired similar projects in the Pacific region, Korea and Indonesia.

Since 1971, New York Sea Grant (NYSG) has represented a statewide network of integrated research, education and extension services promoting coastal community economic vitality, environmental sustainability and citizen awareness and understanding about the State’s marine and Great Lakes resources.

NYSG historically leverages on average a 3 to 6-fold return on each invested federal dollar, annually. We benefit from this, as these resources are invested in Sea Grant staff and their work in communities right here in New York.

Through NYSG’s efforts, the combined talents of university scientists and extension specialists help develop and transfer science-based information to many coastal user groups—businesses and industries, federal, state and local government decision-makers and agency managers, educators, the media and the interested public.

New York Sea Grant, one of the largest of the state Sea Grant programs, is a cooperative program of the State University of New York (SUNY) and Cornell University. The program maintains Great Lakes offices at Cornell University, SUNY Buffalo, Rochester Institute of Technology, SUNY Oswego, the Wayne County Cooperative Extension office in Newark, and in Watertown. In the State's marine waters, NYSG has offices at Stony Brook University and with Cornell Cooperative Extension of Nassau County on Long Island, in Queens, at Brooklyn College, with Cornell Cooperative Extension in NYC, in Bronx, with Cornell Cooperative Extension of Ulster County in Kingston, and with Cornell Cooperative Extension of Westchester County in Elmsford.

For updates on Sea Grant activities: www.nyseagrant.org, follow us on social media (Facebook, Twitter/X, Instagram, Bluesky, LinkedIn, and YouTube). NYSG offers a free e-list sign up via www.nyseagrant.org/nycoastlines for its flagship publication, NY Coastlines/Currents, which it publishes 2-3 times a year.