Lifetime Award Winner: Columnists Should Get Out and Report

By: Dave Astor "Get out of the office. If you're not reporting, you're not going to be relevant for long."

Those were the words of Los Angeles Times columnist Steve Lopez after receiving the Ernie Pyle Lifetime Achievement Award this weekend at the National Society of Newspaper Columnists (NSNC) conference here.

Lopez certainly gets out of the office (and not just to pick up prizes). For instance, he visited Mexico this month to look into the background of a Los Angeles woman. Her life is very difficult -- living with six kids in a one-bedroom apartment. But after seeing the impoverished condition of the Mexican locale she's from, Lopez was able to give readers a visceral sense of why so many Mexicans came to America.

Before coming to the Times, Lopez's jobs include a stint at The Philadelphia Inquirer. "I'm now working for my seventh newspaper," he said. "The reason I move around a lot is because I only have 40 or 50 columns in my entire bag of tricks."

Lopez was joking, but he did say he's still learning about column writing and still developing his writing voice. "If a column doesn't have your voice, you're doing it wrong," he said.

Presenting the award to Lopez at the National D-Day Museum in New Orleans was NSNC President Mike Leonard. The Herald-Times of Bloomington, Ind., columnist praised Lopez as a "tough" and "funny" writer.