Chicago Headline Club Announces LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD WINNERS

The Chicago Headline Club – the largest local chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists in the country – announced the winners of its 2010 Lifetime Achievement Awards. Veteran Chicago journalists Roger Ebert, Richard C. Longworth and Elizabeth Brackett will be honored for their extraordinary work in Chicago journalism at the 34th  annual Peter Lisagor Awards for Exemplary Journalism banquet on May 6.

•   ROGER EBERT has been the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times since 1967. He won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 1975, and his reviews are now syndicated in more than 200 newspapers in the U.S., Canada, England, Japan and Greece.
Ebert is the co-host of television’s “Ebert & Roeper,” which appears in more than 200 markets and continues to rank as the top-rated weekly syndicated half-hour on television. For 23 years, he co-hosted “Siskel & Ebert” with the late Gene Siskel.
•   RICHARD C. LONGWORTH is a veteran of the City News Bureau, UPI – both in Chicago and abroad – and the Chicago Tribune where he spent nearly 30 years as an economics reporter, business editor, chief European correspondent and senior writer. Twice a Pulitzer Prize finalist, Longworth has reported from 80 countries and covered such historic events such as the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago, all European revolutions of 1989, plus wars in the Mideast, Somalia and Kosovo. Longworth has won the Overseas Press Club Award twice, and has captured every major national award for economic reporting and a Lowell Thomas Travel Journalism Award for his camel trek through the Sahara. For the Tribune and in his two books, he specialized in globalization and its impact on Chicago and the Midwest. He is a senior fellow at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs.
•   ELIZABETH BRACKETT currently serves as correspondent and substitute host for WTTW11’s flagship nightly public affairs program Chicago Tonight. During her tenure, she has covered presidential, mayoral and gubernatorial races, Chicago financial exchanges, the Chicago Bulls and genetic research, to name a few.

Since 1984, she has also served as local correspondent for the PBS program The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. In that role she has covered national and international stories on an in-depth basis. Before joining WTTW, Brackett served as a general assignment reporter for WLS-TV, WGN-TV and Radio and WBBM-TV.
Brackett has won two Midwest Emmy Awards, two Peter Lisagor Awards for Business Journalism and a National Peabody Award.
“This year’s awards and recipients carry on our tradition of honoring outstanding journalists,” said Susan S. Stevens, president of the Chicago  Headline Club. “Chicago has so many great journalists that it is really difficult to single out just a few each year.”

In addition to the Lifetime Achievement Awards, the Chicago Headline Club will award its 2010 Watchdog Award for Excellence in Public Interest Reporting and will announce the winners of the Lisagor awards, which are awarded Chicago-area journalists for their exemplary work and truly superior contributions to journalism in a variety of categories. Winners were selected for such attributes as enterprise, accuracy, scope, style and impact.

The Chicago Headline Club will also announce the

recipient of the $2,500 Les H. Brownlee Scholarship to a Chicago-area journalism student and two $2,500 scholarships for journalism students who will have unpaid summer internships in the Chicago area.
Chicago Tribune Editor Gerould Kern will give the keynote address.
The awards dinner will be held at the Hotel Allegro, 171 W. Randolph St. in Chicago, and begins at 5:30 p.m. Tickets to the dinner are $65 for members, $85 for non-members and $800 for a table of 10.

For more information and to purchase tickets to attend the dinner, please call  Kathy Catrambone, Headline Club executive director, 312-553-0393, or visit www.headlineclub.org.

WEBSTER-KIRKWOOD TIMES INC. ACQUIRES WEST END WORD

The West End Word, a newspaper which offers coverage of “city living from the Arch to the Innerbelt,” has been acquired by the community journalism publishing company of Webster-Kirkwood Times Inc. The Word is one of the city’s oldest independent newspapers and becomes the third newspaper in the portfolio of Webster-Kirkwood Times Inc.

“All of us at the Times are excited by this new challenge and opportunity,” said Dwight Bitikofer, president of Webster-Kirkwood Times Inc. “It’s a unique opportunity to bring our proven brand of reliable journalism, and service to advertising clients, to a vibrant and vital area of the greater St. Louis community.

“We are pleased that Jeff Fister and his family, owners of the West End Word, came to us with the idea that we are the best fit for taking up the 39-year legacy of the West End Word,” said Bitikofer, who is publisher for the papers. “With this acquisition, the community newspapers of Webster-Kirkwood Times Inc. will have more readers, more reach and more visibility than any other independent and locally-owned newspaper operation in the St. Louis region.”

The Times will take over publishing operations of the West End Word in late April. It will keep the publication’s name and will publish the first issue under its management on May 4.

Neighborhood volunteers in the Central West End area of St. Louis started the Word as part of a “back-to-the-city movement” in 1972, Fister explained. The newspaper grew as these urban pioneers rediscovered the great art, history and architecture of the area.  Jeff and Richard Fister’s Virginia Publishing Company bought the publication in 1989 and expanded the circulation to midtown St. Louis and parts of University City, Clayton and Maplewood.

“We are pleased that our coverage area now takes in world-class museums, bustling arts and entertainment venues, premiere health care centers and Washington University, St. Louis University, Fontbonne University and much more,” said Don Corrigan, editor of Webster-Kirkwood Times Inc. “We look forward to continuing the tradition of arts and entertainment coverage of the Word, and bringing our expertise on local news, features and political coverage.”

The Webster-Kirkwood Times began in 1978. The South County Times has roots reaching back to 1947. The two community papers have a combined distribution of over 77,000 each week. The West End Word adds 20,000 papers on an every-two-week schedule.