The 2010 Studs Terkel Community Awards

The 2010 Studs Terkel Media Awards, Wednesday, March 10, 2010 at the GAR Hall, Chicago Cultural Center. Read more about the event

About Terkel Awards | View the Photo Gallery | Watch the “Behind the Scenes” video

Much more than a party, our 21st Anniversary Awards will celebrate the talent in our ever-changing media landscape as well as Studs’ phenomenal life. We will honor journalists who go the extra mile to report news “from the people who made Chicago, news that’s bottom up rather than up, down,” as Studs said at our 2007 awards event. “That’s what this is all about.”

2010 Studs Terkel Community Media Award Winners

Kate Grossman
Deputy Editorial Page Editor
Chicago Sun-Times

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
Public Affairs Reporter
Chicago Public Radio

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

Progress Illinois

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

Mitchell Wenkus is the 2010 winner of the Community Media Workshop’s $2,000 Studs Terkel Scholarship for his documentary “Joey & Jamal: A Chicago Public School Story.” “Mitch is concerned about the long term impact of a violent and failing school system, but he doesn’t preach about it, or whine about it,” according to Jeff Spitz, the faculty member who nominated him for the scholarship. “He allows viewers to come to their own conclusion after meeting [Joe & Jamal’s] family.”

Special Thanks to

Dale Griffin