WASHINGTON, DC — Today, NLGJA: The Association of LGBTQ Journalists announced that longtime Miami Herald reporter Steve Rothaus, Recode co-founder Kara Swisher and LGBTQ pioneer Lilli Vincenz are the 2019 inductees in the LGBTQ Journalists Hall of Fame. Their induction will take place on August 31 at the NLGJA National Convention in New Orleans.
The LGBTQ Journalists Hall of Fame was launched to honor outstanding individuals like Pulitzer Prize-winning NLGJA founder Leroy Aarons and to tell their stories. To date, the LGBTQ Journalists Hall of Fame has honored 45 LGBTQ individuals, living and deceased, who have left a lasting mark on their profession through their own courage and mastery of the practice of journalism.
Rothaus worked at the Miami Herald for over 30 years, covering LGBTQ issues for two decades. During his time there, he was part of news teams awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service and the Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Reporting. In 2014, he co-produced the Emmy Award-winning documentary "The Day It Snowed in Miami: A Chronology of the LGBT-Rights Movement."
Throughout his celebrated career, he also has been recognized for his body of work by GLAAD, Equality Florida, PRSA, SAVE LGBTQ, the National LGBTQ Task Force, and inducted into the Miami Dade College Hall of Fame, among other honors. In April 2016, the Columbia Journalism Review published, "How the Miami Herald's Steve Rothaus became an LGBT Pioneer in Mainstream Journalism."
Rothaus served for five years as a national board member of NLGJA. He founded NLGJA's Newsroom Outreach Project and traveled the country visiting newspapers, television stations and universities to discuss LGBTQ news coverage and workplace issues. He lives in Miami with his husband, Ric Katz.
Swisher is an award-winning business journalist and is recognized as one of the nation's most respected writers on the business of technology. In a 2016 profile headlined, "Kara Swisher is Silicon Valley's Most Feared and Well-Liked Journalist. How Does That Work?" New York Magazine said Swisher is one of the "major power brokers of tech reporting," whose, "combination of access and toughness has made [her] a preeminent arbiter of status in a Silicon Valley."
She is co-founder and editor-at-large of the website Recode, executive producer of the Code Conference Series and a weekly columnist for The New York Times opinion section, as well as a regular contributor to NBC News. Swisher also hosts two popular podcasts, "Recode Decode" and "Pivot with Scott Galloway." She previously co-produced and co-hosted "D: All Things Digital," a major high-tech conference for The Wall Street Journal conducting interviews with Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Larry Ellison. She was also co-executive editor of the tech and media website AllThingsD.com .
While working at The Wall Street Journal, Swisher inaugurated the column "BoomTown" about the rise of Silicon Valley. Previously, she worked as a reporter for The Washington Post and as an editor at the City Paper of Washington, D.C. She is the author of two books recounting the history of AOL.
Vincenz is a path-breaking journalist and pioneer of the gay rights movement beginning in the early 1960s. Born in 1937 in Germany, she lived there throughout World War II before coming to the U.S. with her family at the age of 12. She joined the Mattachine Society of Washington in 1962 as one of their first lesbian members and served as editor of their monthly magazine, The Homosexual Citizen. She filmed the 1968 Annual Reminder in Philadelphia and the first Christopher Street Liberation Day march in 1970. Her films contributed to a priceless visual archive of the gay rights movement and were donated to the Library of Congress in 2013, along with documents, photographs and memorabilia covering 50 years of America's LGBTQ civil rights movement.
Vincenz wrote a bi-weekly column for the New York-based GAY magazine and was a frequent contributor to other community publications. In 1969 in Washington, D.C., she co-founded The Gay Blade, an independent gay newspaper, later renamed The Washington Blade. In 1966, Vincenz became the first woman, with her face recognizable, to appear on the cover of The Ladder, a lesbian magazine. She currently lives in Arlington, Virginia.
NLGJA is the leading professional organization for LGBTQ journalists with more than 20 chapters nationwide, as well as members around the world. Inductees will be honored at this year's National Convention to be held in New Orleans, August 29 - September 1. More information is available at www.nlgja.org/2019 .
About NLGJA: The Association of LGBTQ Journalists:
NLGJA is an organization of journalists, news executives, media professionals, educators and students working from within the news industry to foster fair and accurate coverage of LGBTQ issues. NLGJA opposes all forms of workplace bias and provides professional development to its members. For more information, visit www.nlgja.org .
—From a press release
