Toni Ginnetti – Print Award
Toni Ginnetti was a reporter for the Chicago Sun-Times for 33 years, starting in 1981 and retiring in 2014. She started in the news department as a general assignment reporter, later working on several investigative projects. She won a Peter Lisagor Award for reporting in 1984, the third of her career.
She moved to the sports department in 1986 as a special projects writer, then began covering major league baseball. She won awards for investigative projects on the problems intertwined in the multi-million dollar explosion of college sports and also on organized crime’s control of sports betting.
She covered the 1988 Winter Olympics in Calgary, Canada and the Summer Games in Seoul, Korea.
She added college basketball to her duties in 1988 covering DePaul University and later wrote a weekly column and stories on national college basketball and covered four Final Fours.
In 1992 she was the beat writer for the Chicago Cubs and continued regular coverage of the Cubs and White Sox since then. She covered All-Star Games and playoff and World Series events and has been a continuing member of the Baseball Writers Association of America since 1986. She has been a voter for the Baseball Hall of Fame since 1996 and a member of the selection committee choosing candidates for the Veteran’s Committee vote on the Hall of Fame.
She was a panel member for three years on the weekly “Sportswriters Show’’ on WGN-AM radio.
She was named the winner of the Hallmark Award of the Chicago Baseball Cancer Charities, Inc. in 1999 and names sportswriter of the year in 2003 by the Pitch and Hit Club of Chicago.
She was presented with the Leonardo da Vinci Award for Communications in 2008 and in 2017 was one of 10 recipients of the Impresa Award by the Joint Civic Committee of Italian Americans honoring outstanding women of the Chicago Italian American Community.
She began her career at the Daily Herald in Arlington Heights, Il, where she worked as a general assignment and investigator reporter. During her tenure, she won a variety of awards, including two Jacob Scher Awards for investigative reporting, two Peter Lisagor Awards for reporting, a UPI award for feature writing and suburban reporter of the year from the Suburban Press Association.
She is a graduate of Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism.
She grew up in Elmwood Park, Il., with her parents, the late Nunzio and Helen, and a brother and two sisters. All four became college graduates. Her father immigrated to Chicago from Raiano, Italy, in 1947 and worked for 25 years as a heavy duty equipment mechanic, also becoming a U.S. citizen. Her mother, a seamstress and drapery designer, emigrated from the same Italian town with her family in 1922 as a young child and became a naturalized citizen. She and Nunzio met when her family traveled back to visit their hometown in 1946. They married there before eventually returning to the Chicago area.