Windy City Times publisher Tracy Baim to receive Life Achievement Award

Sat. April 5, 2014 8:41 AM by GoPride.com News Staff

tracy baim

Chicago, IL - The Chicago Headline Club will next month recognize Tracy Baim, publisher and executive editor at Windy City Media Group, with a Lifetime Achievement Award.

Baim, along with Bill Kurtis and Karen Meyer, will be honored for their extraordinary work in Chicago journalism at the 37th annual Peter Lisagor Awards for Exemplary Journalism banquet on Friday, May 2.

Baim co-founded Windy City Times in 1985 and Outlines newspaper in 1987. She has won numerous gay community and journalism honors, including the Community Media Workshop's Studs Terkel Award in 2005. She started in Chicago LGBT journalism in 1984 at GayLife newspaper, one month after graduating with a news-editorial degree from Drake University.

In addition to her duties with Windy City Times, Chicago's LGBT newspaper, Baim is the editor and co-author of Gay Press, Gay Power: The Growth of LGBT Community Newspapers in America (2012), a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award and a Top 10 selection from the American Library Association GLBT Round Table.

Kurtis spent 30 years anchoring and covering the news at WBBM-TV CBS-2 and then established Kurtis Productions, traveling to the far ends of the earth for the Peabody Award-winning series The New Explorers, which aired on PBS.

Meyer has been a feature reporter with ABC 7 since 1991. Her segments, which deal with issues pertaining to people with disabilities, appear on the ABC 7 Sunday Morning News and on ABC7 Saturday Morning News.

Windy City Times is also a Peter Lisagor Award finalist in the category of editorial writing for a non-daily newspaper. The submission is for a series of 2013 editorials by Baim on the battle for marriage equality in Illinois.

The winners of the 37th annual awards will be announced at the banquet on May 2. A wide range of Chicago-area online, print and broadcast media are finalists again this year.

Last year, Windy City Times won two Peter Lisagor Awards. The first award was in the feature writing category, for the "Generation Halsted: LGBTQ Youth Series". The series was written primarily by Kate Sosin, Erica Demarest and Bill Healy, and designed by Kirk Williamson. The second award went to Ross Forman for sports writing, for his feature "Esera Tuaolo: Coming back from darkness."

The Chicago Headline Club is the largest Society of Professional Journalists chapter in the country. 
 

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