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Mary Gavin of the Evanston Roundtable, Acceptance Remarks
I am honored and delighted to accept the Studs Terkel award. I think this is really an honor for the Evanston RoundTable and I would like to accept it on behalf of everyone who has worked to make the Evanston RoundTable a strong voice in the Evanston community.
I thank the RoundTable staff for the time and the concerted work – sales, layout, photography, design, editing, proofreading, conversation and chocolate-sampling – that keep us in touch with our mission.
More personally there are some friends and family members here on whom I’ve relied for years – for guidance, support and advice – even if I didn’t seem to follow it – and I thank you for your friendship and good humor.
From the beginning we wanted the RoundTable to be a community paper to look closely at Evanston, and we wanted it to be a free paper, so it would be accessible.
Two values of a community newspaper, I think, are providing objective information and connecting the parts of the community to one another.
If we provide objective information, we can begin a dialogue on important issues – schools, housing, taxes, development, the location of our civic center, protection of our elm trees and post-top traffic lights.
If we write about what is going on with the different cultures within Evanston – a new ethnic restaurant or retail shop, the knitting club at a local school, the Caribbean cricket team, persons with developmental disabilities making baby quilts for a day-care center, creative housing for persons with a mental illness, poetry by teen mothers who are determined to finish high school and college – we are, I believe, helping to unravel the fear that too often accompanies difference and show the connections among the community.
If we write about a problem, we know that there is or soon will be an official committee appointed to look at the problem.
Also, we know that, because it’s Evanston, it is likely that there will be at least one grassroots ad-hoc committee formed shortly afterward to propose even more solutions and act as a watchdog on the official committee.
Studs Terkel is the pioneer in revealing the importance of what we do in our daily lives. His work appreciates the value of commitment and hard work while celebrating the strength and dignity of people’s lives.
It is humbling and gratifying that you have deemed our newspaper and my part in it worthy of this award.
Thank you
Thom suggested that I saw a few words about surviving as a print newspaper in the world of the Internet. Like other papers, we plan to survive and are still working out a plan for compatibility.
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