Daily Herald’s Jim Slusher wins James C. Craven Freedom of the Press Award

Jim Slusher, the Daily Herald’s managing editor for opinion and administration, has been honored with the 2025 James C. Craven Freedom of the Press Award at the Illinois Press Association convention.

The annual award recognizes a journalist for a lifelong commitment to the principles of a free and open press. It was named for a longtime Springfield attorney who offered counsel to IPA member publications.

In presenting the award Thursday night in East Peoria, Craven’s son Don, IPA’s president and chief executive officer, read from one of Slusher’s columns that quoted playwright Tom Stoppard on the power of words: “If you get the right ones, in the right order, you can nudge the world a little.”

“This year’s recipient of the James C. Craven Award has been putting the right words in the right order for many years,” Don Craven said. “While writing column after column, he has also been instilling his passion for community journalism, his passion to nudge the world, in the young and not-so-young journalists who have come into his orbit.”

Craven hailed Slusher as an advocate for community journalism and a free press, as well as “a teacher, a mentor and an example to us all.”

Slusher expressed his surprise and appreciation for the honor.

“I’m a little embarrassed because I don’t generally feel my work is much different from that of all the dedicated journalists I’ve worked with over the years — and considerably less impressive than so many of them. But I hope I can honor the spirit and dedication of those in our profession,” he said after the awards ceremony. “For more than 25 years, my column has tried to help readers understand how those qualities drive us and guide our work, and I’m humbled that my colleagues have considered me a worthy representative of them.”

Slusher, a 1974 Western Illinois University graduate, worked in print and broadcast journalism in Iowa, Illinois, Michigan and California before returning to Illinois in 1989 to take charge of the Daily Herald’s copy desk operations. He went on to hold a variety of supervisory positions before being named editor of the Opinion page in 2010.

In 1999, his weekly column “Letter to Readers” debuted in the Daily Herald to build a more personal relationship between the newspaper and its readers and provide explanations for the newspaper’s philosophies and decisions.