Former Newsday biz reporter dies

According to an internal memo, Dennis Duggan, a former Newsday business reporter and until recently a columnist for the paper, died this morning at St. Vincent’s Hospital in Manhattan. He was 78.

In a memo to the staff, Newsday editor John Mancini wrote, “We here at Newsday have had the good fortune to know and love Dennis as a colleague since Nov. 27, 1967, when he joined the paper as a business and financial writer.

“He made his mark, of course, as columnist of long standing. He was a day-in, day-out reporter, generous with anyone who came to him for help, in the newsroom or on the street. He had a fervent commitment to the craft he loved so deeply and to the city he knew so well.”

“He had more friends than any man I know. His heart-felt connection to our readers held through his last working days, and we are grateful that he chose to call Newsday his home for nearly four decades.

“Dennis may have been the last journalist on the newspaper beat in the city who worked as a reporter on the storied New York Herald Tribune. We can state with more certainty that he was the last of the breed of shoe-leather columnists whose lyrical vision lured so many of us into the business.”

Duggan also worked as the real estate reporter for the New York Herald Tribune in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

An online obituary can be found here.