Two years ago Dawn Reiss left a good reporting job at a Florida newspaper to take on Chicago. She had no work waiting for her here and knew almost no one. Unless some golden opportunity fell into her lap, she’d have to chase her dream as a freelancer.
Reservations can be made until April 20, but some media shops have already made their intentions known. The Tribune used to buy two tables; last year it bought one and this year it’s buying one. Last year the Southtown Star bought a table; this year it’s sharing a table with the papers in the Sun-Times Media Group’s Fox Valley Group. Last year Pioneer Press bought a table and won a couple awards; this year there are no Pioneer Press finalists—and there’s no Pioneer Press table either.
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Looking for a forecast, I called the president of the Headline Club—none other than Dawn Reiss. At the suggestion of Meg Tebo, a former Headline Club president and someone Reiss did know in Chicago, Reiss joined the board two years ago, and last June she was elected president. Normally there’s a president-elect who takes over. But the president-elect decided to go to law school and another vice president got a better job out of town. So a power vacuum existed and Reiss was ready to fill it.
When Reiss took over as president she started a monthly burger night—inviting veterans to drop by the Billy Goat to kick around ideas for an hour or two with any other journalists who wandered in. I was Reiss’s guest a month ago. There are only two topics anymore—the death of media and the transformation of media. Somebody said weekly community newspapers seemed to be holding their own, and I replied that I’d just spent the afternoon working up a blog post on Wednesday Journal Inc.’s decision to shut down three of its weeklies. One guy in the small crowd wryly complimented me on my reporting skills. He hadn’t heard yet what Wednesday Journal was doing, and he was one of its editors. He left early.
Myers, a finalist for two Lisagors—for in-depth reporting and editorial writing in the community newspaper category—thought he’d be attending the dinner on his own dime until Haley called him this week to say the company would cover the ticket. “Frankly,” Myers told me before he knew that, “I don’t know if I’d be able to shell out 80 bucks for a ticket if I wasn’t a finalist. I wanted to go see if I won.”
Among the more unstable inclinations of the human heart is its desire to give away money to worthy causes. Offered a pretty good reason to stop giving, many of us gladly take it. StreetWise was forever tarnished as a favored cause of mine in 2001, when, as I began a column then, “The editor of StreetWise and other staffers went into open rebellion” against the executive director. The rebels, who had my sympathy, as they championed the editorial quality of the newspaper, wound up leaving StreetWise, and thereafter I’ve felt Chicago’s street paper isn’t what it should be and guarded my wallet accordingly.
StreetWise has never received government funding, Crane says, but other not-for-profits have, and as it dried up they turned to the same foundations StreetWise has relied on—foundations with now battered endowments. “We’d love to get funding through the stimulus package,” Crane says. “We certainly feel we’re the right kind of agency to get that kind of help.”
