- Sun-Times Media
- Peter Lisagor
Is it a time to worry?
Sue Stevens sounds just as blase. She joined the Headline Club in 1969, she’s a former president, and at the moment she’s regional director of the Society of Professional Journalists, the Headline Club’s parent group. She’s seen it all. “With journalists it’s like herding cats,” she tells me. “You don’t know until the last minute what you’ve got.” Ever since the bottom fell out of (1) mainstream journalism and (2) the economy, Stevens has been expecting a Lisagor contest to come along that nobody would enter because nobody could afford to, not even the handful of journalists with actual jobs.
A friend who is no technological idiot decided a few days ago to enter some stories he’d written for his own website. Baffled by the Headline Club’s registration and entry process, he called another friend and vented. That friend tested the same waters, found them likewise, and called me.
The entry process is long, tangled, cold, nosy, and—there being no explanation provided to make us think otherwise—largely gratuitous. That it isn’t impossible is cold comfort to those who don’t have much tolerance for the digital universe when it isn’t warm and friendly; but the Headline Club’s own numbers—in recent years if not this one—strongly suggest we’ve become a handful. At least Stevens is an ally. “I’d go back to paper ballots myself,” she says. “But, oh well—”
