Sun-Times staffers win top reporting honor at Chicago journalism awards

Staff Report October 14, 2011 11:16PM

Governor Pat Quinn stands next to Chicago Sun-Times columnist Stella Foster as she greets guests prior to receiving the Chicago Journalists Association lifetime achievement award at a dinner and ceremony on Friday, October 14, 2011 in Chicago. | Richard A. Chapman~Sun-Times

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Updated: December 3, 2011 8:00AM

Chicago Sun-Times columnist Stella Foster was honored Friday night with a lifetime achievement award by the Chicago Journalists Association at a ceremony that also saw the Sun-Times win the organization’s top honor for reporting.

The Chicago Journalists Association presented its 72nd annual Sarah Brown Boyden Awards Friday, recognizing the best in journalism in the city and suburbs over the past year.

Foster’s honor recognized her “Stella’s Column,” which she began in 2003 and which appears in print every Tuesday and Thursday, and for the key role she played for more than three decades before that as the assistant to the late Sun-Times columnist Irv Kupcinet. The group called Foster a “consummate journalist . . . She knows what makes Chicago tick.”

For work published in the past year, Sun-Times staffers took home top honors for public service, online journalism, business reporting, photography and editorial writing, as well as the journalism group’s top prize, the “best of the best” honor, chosen from among the prize-winners in the contest’s 11 reporting, writing and photography categories.

That went to reporters Frank Main and Mark Konkol and photographer John J. Kim for a series of stories published over a nine-month span that examined “why they won’t stop shooting in Chicago.” Those stories also took the group’s top honor for public service. The series also won a Pulitzer Prize earlier this year.

In addition, Kim was recognized as the best in photography over the past year, for photos and an audio slideshow that were part of the Dec. 28-30, 2010, series “Area 5 Homicide.”

Other Sun-Times staffers honored Friday night:

†Critic / columnist / blogger Roger Ebert, best in online journalism, for a selection of essays on a wide range of subjects in his online blog, “Roger Ebert’s Journal,” at blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/.

†Reporters Francine Knowles, Sandra Guy, Kim Janssen and Mary Wisniewski, tops in business reporting, for a series of stories on the impact of the recession.

† The editorial page staff of Tom McNamee, Kate N. Grossman, Thomas Frisbie and Monifa Thomas, recognized for editorials, primarily for urging the abolition of the death penalty in Illinois, as well as writing on a variety of other subjects.

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