I’m happy to report that New York Deadline Club President Rebecca Baker has been selected to receive this year’s Howard S. Dubin Outstanding Pro Member Awards.

Baker, along with Utah Pro Chapter member Linda Petersen, will receive the award during the President’s Installation Banquet at the Excellence in Journalism 2011 conference in New Orleans, hosted by SPJ and the Radio Television Digital News Association.

The award is named for Howard S. Dubin, a longtime SPJ member who remains active with the national organization, local chapters and the Sigma Delta Chi Foundation, the educational arm of SPJ.  Each year, an honoree is selected from a chapter with fewer than 75 members as well as one from a chapter with more than 75 members.

As your regional director, I’m pleased that Rebecca has received this honor since I have had the pleasure of knowing her for more than a decade.

Baker covers Westchester County courts and the criminal justice system for the Journal News in New York’s northern suburbs. But those of us in Connecticut remember her as a loyal and highly motivated SPJ member while work at the New Haven Register before she left to go to work for the Journal News.

She has helped expand the membership of the Deadline Club, which is already one of the nation’s largest SPJ pro chapters with  more than 300 members.  She put together a Freedom of Information panel, an annual event that won an SPJ award in 2010 and has become a staple of the Deadline Club’s annual programming.

Here in Region 1, she also chaired the sold-out 2010 spring conference. Rebecca showed great leadership, working with members of the Connecticut and New Jersey chapters to put on one of the most successful Region 1 conferences in recent memory.

Fellow Deadline Club member John Long said that, “regardless of the challenge,  Rebecca is always her cheerful, enthusiastic, optimistic, upbeat self, leading the charge that the rest of us just can’t resist following.”

Baker said that receiving the award is a tremendous honor for her.

“Howard Dubin has given selflessly of himself to the Society for manyears, and to be in the same company as him is a privilege,” she said.

This entry was posted by Luther Turmelle on Thursday, July 28th, 2011 at 5:31 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.