The Community Media Workshop is proud to announce the 2010 Studs Terkel Community Media Award Winners.

In preparing to be a journalist, Sun-Times Editorial Page Deputy Editor Kate Grossman decided to study policy and spend a year teaching at a Chicago public school. “I’m a little bit of an odd bird,” she says.

Her grasp of how government works—or could work better—has produced reporting and more recently commentary that shaped debates and framed decisions on Chicago’s public housing and schools.

After a year in the early 1990s as s production assistant at ABC’s 20/20 in Washington, D.C., she could see a career path there, but “I never left the building,” she recalls. Not a good fit for someone who says her trademark is “to really dig in and see what’s actually happening.” Read More

Natalie Moore calls herself a groupie who got hired for a dream job: from a new bureau office at 69th and Halsted, she’s covering the South Side full time—not when something bad happens.

“I’m definitely a policywonk and nerd,” she says, but also a storyteller. “You have to come to the story with the facts, not the anecdote,” she says. “Once you have the facts and the meat of it, then you put the anecdote around it. The anecdotes are emotional; the policy has bigger implications to it.”

Community development, youth violence, digging in on education at Robeson High School, and the Olympics are among the topics Natalie’s covered in hundreds of stories since 2007. Much of this is, as she puts it, “the meat and potatoes” issues facing South Side neighborhoods: not off the beaten path, but real issues in to the people in these communities. Read More

Post by post, Progress Illinois’ Josh Kalven, Adam Doster, and Angela Caputo are mapping a new kind of news with their progressive political coverage of government from the local to the national levels.

Their site, sponsored by Service Employees International Union, is among the most successful of the local new news sites in achieving their self-professed goals: to engage non-insiders in some of the play-by-play of politics and policy, and to fill in some gaps in coverage of community, advocacy and nonprofit groups. Read More