Tonight the Chicago Headline Club assembles to give out awards for the best work in local journalism. Shannon Heffernan and I are finalists in the category of Best Multimedia Presentation, for the video we produced on the Plant for WBEZ’s regional reporting initiative, Front & Center:

I’m pretty excited. I was a finalist in 2007, for the story I did about the Palace Theater in Gary, Ind. I lost that time around, rightly so, to a fabulous documentary my colleagues from WBEZ produced about Mexican migrant workers living in the U.S.

Our competition this time around is…interesting. There are two other finalists in our category. One is a well-produced and touching piece from the Times of NWI about a restaurant in Hammond, Ind. closing after nearly 6 decades. It’s pretty good, and I wish them well in the competition.

The other, though, puzzles me. It’s an expose by a London-based reporter for Bloomberg News, looking into allegations that Victoria’s Secrets unknowingly sourced some of the cotton it uses in its clothing from people using African child labor.

There’s no doubt it’s a compelling piece of journalism. What, though, is the Chicago connection here? I thought the Lisagors were supposed to be for reporting done in the Chicago-area; the only Chicago connection I can see here is that the reporter cites the cost of a pair of Victoria’s Secrets underwear for sale at Water Tower Place. I’ll be a little peeved if we lose to this piece.

Neither Shannon nor I can go to the awards ceremony tonight, unfortunately, but we’ll have colleagues looking out for us. Keep your fingers crossed for us!

Update: No, we did not win the Lisagor. Yes, the guy from Bloomberg won. Oh well! We’ll try again next year.