Dan Roan – Broadcast Award

Dan Roan is currently the weekday sports anchor of the later WGN Evening News broadcasts and WGN News at Nine and WGN News at Ten. He also hosts ‘GN Sports, WGN’s half hour sports show airing weekdays at 10:30pm. Dan joined the WGN-TV sports staff in February 1984.

Dan began his career in 1977 at WCIA-TV in Champaign, Illinois, where he was a sports director for seven years.

Dan has worn many hats at WGN. In the past, he has hosted and co-produced pregame and halftime shows for WGN’s NBA and Major League Baseball telecasts. He was also a substitute play-by-play announcer for WGN’s Bulls, Cubs and White Sox games. In addition, he was the lead announcer for the station’s telecasts of DePaul University basketball. Dan also worked play-by-play on the station’s Notre Dame football telecasts in 1988, when the fighting Irish won a national championship. When Chicago Blackhawks returned to WGN’s programming schedule, Dan was also hosting between-periods segments during hockey telecasts.

Dan has been recognized during his time at WGN, winning multiple Emmy Awards for his work as host, producer, reporter and play-by-play announcer. In 1994, he won three Emmy Awards for sports-related programming.

A native of Keokuk, Iowa, Dan graduated from Illinois State University in 1976.

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.

Cooper Rollow – Posthumous Award

Cooper Rollow had a 35-year career at the Chicago Tribune in sports after working for newspapers in Fort Scott, Kansas, and Lincoln, Nebraska, following college and military. He was sports editor from 1965-1977 and served as the President of Chicago Tribune Charities.

Cooper received numerous awards including the Pro Football Hall of Fame’s Dick McCann Memorial Award (which is the hall of fame for writers) and the Illinois Associated Press Sports Writer of The Year in 1961 (for his series on Green Bay Packers Coach Vince Lombardi).

Cooper was a founding member of the Pro Football Writers of America. He covered the first Super Bowl and 31 straight more.

Cooper wrote pieces that involved major world events such as his Page One coverage of the massacre of 11 of Israel’s Olympic team members at the 1972 Olympics in Munich.

A Kansas native, Copper was born in Wichita in 1925. After high school, he served in the U.S. Army  in General George Patton’s 3d Army. After the army, he graduated with a journalism degree from Kansas University. His career began as a journalist for the Fort Scott Tribune in Kansas. He died in 2013 in Elmhurst, Illinois.