Chicago, IL – The Chicago Headline Club is proud to announce the recipients of the 2025 Lifetime Achievement Award: Theresa Gutierrez, Chuck Goudie, Rummana Hussain, and Curtis Lawrence. The award recognizes their exceptional contributions to journalism and tireless efforts to give readers, listeners and viewers the truth they needed to know about Chicago.
All four will be celebrated Friday, May 9, at the Peter Lisagor Award ceremony at the Union League Club. The award recognizes the best of Chicago journalism and is named for Peter Lisagor, the Chicago Daily News’ Washington bureau chief from 1959 to 1976.
The Lifetime Achievement Award committee found that each of these tremendous journalists has delivered important and meaningful stories over their many years in their fields of expertise. The citizens of Chicago and Illinois have benefited greatly from their work.
Theresa Gutierrez
Emmy award-winning journalist with ABC 7 Chicago
Theresa Gutierrez is an Emmy award-winning journalist. She worked at ABC 7 Chicago for nearly 43 years before retiring in 2014. Gutierrez was one of the first Hispanic women to break into television journalism. Gutierrez along with Barbara Walters, Connie Chung, Christiane Amanpour, and Jane Pauley were featured on the cover of the educational book, Women Who Broke Barriers: The New Face of TV News. In 2006 she was inducted into the Television Academy Silver Circle Hall of Fame.
Gutierrez spent most of her tenure there as a general assignment reporter, a role she held from 1986 to 2014. In addition to her reporting, Gutierrez produced and hosted several shows, including “N Beat”, half hour specials featuring prominent hispanic people making a positive impact on their communities; and The Feminine Franchise, a feminist program dealing with topics impacting women.
Throughout her career, she has also been civically engaged, serving on many boards including (but not limited to): The Judge James Geroulis Foundation, The Children’s home and Aid Society of Illinois and the Child Welfare League of America.
Chuck Goudie
Senior Investigative Reporter at NBC Chicago
Chuck Goudie joined NBC Chicago in early 2025 after nearly 45 years on the air at ABC-Chicago. Goudie’s hard-hitting investigative reporting has won major awards and has led to internal investigations at state and federal agencies, shut down illegal businesses and shady charities, changed or created laws and prompted criminal charges and the incarceration of wrongdoers.
Goudie’s hard-news career began as a Detroit-based reporter/producer with the NBC-owned News and Information Service in 1975, the first 24-hour, all-news national radio network.
Goudie’s first television news reporting position began in 1977 with then-NBC affiliate WSOC in Charlotte, NC. He became the main sports anchor there when it changed affiliations to ABC. Goudie joined ABC/WLS-TV, in Chicago in 1980 as a general assignment reporter and was promoted to chief investigative reporter in 1990.
Goudie is recipient of a national Edward R. Murrow Award for Continuous Television News Reporting. He has also received numerous reporting awards from the Associated Press; Emmy awards from the Chicago Television Academy; Peter Lisagor Awards from the Society for Professional Journalists and Herman Kogan awards from the Chicago Bar Association.
In 2018 Goudie was inducted into the Silver Circle of the National Academy of Television Arts and sciences.
Rummana Hussain
Columnist and Former Editorial Board Member, Chicago Sun-Times
Rummana Hussain is a columnist and was recently assigned to put together the opinions pages at the Chicago Sun-Times. Up until late March, she was also a member of the newspaper’s editorial board. During her career at the Sun-Times, she also had stints as an assistant metro editor, criminal courts reporter, general assignment reporter and assistant to columnist Michael Sneed.
Before heading to the Sun-Times, Rummana covered education and criminal courts in Lake County for the Chicago Tribune and was assigned the crime, education and City Hall beats for the City News Bureau of Chicago. Rummana was named a Jefferson fellow by the East-West Center in 2006. She has served on the board of the Chicago Headline Club and the local chapter of the Asian American Journalists Association. She is a current board member of the Chicago chapter of Asian American Advancing Justice and Silk Road Cultural Center, a community-based artmaking and arts service organization that focuses on the Asian, Middle Eastern and Muslim experience.
Curtis Lawrence
Journalist and Educator
Curtis Lawrence began his journalism career in 1980 at the Rock Island Argus. From there he went on to work at five other daily newspapers including the St. Paul Pioneer Press, the Southtown Economist, the Chicago Tribune, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and the Chicago Sun-Times. He also covered housing for The Chicago Reporter and most recently served as the senior editor of investigations at Block Club Chicago until his retirement in October, 2024.
In 2004, Lawrence joined the full-time faculty at Columbia College Chicago where in addition to teaching, he served as director of the graduate journalism program and adviser to the Columbia Chronicle.
A native of the Roseland community, Lawrence is a recipient of the Studs Terkel Award for excellence in reporting on diverse communities. He also has been recognized by the Peter Lisagor Awards for his non-deadline Chicago Sun-Times reporting on the Chicago Housing Authority and for his participation in the Sun-Times’ team coverage of the E2 Nightclub stampede. Lawrence also was recently honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Chicago Journalists Association.