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  Ray Long has received numerous local and national awards for individual and team reporting, including for spot news, enterprise, investigations and news analysis. He is one of dozens of reporters who participated in the Tribune’s Gateway to Gridlock series in 2000, a staff effort awarded the Pulitzer Prize.

  The Illinois AP awarded Long the 1997 Charles Chamberlain Award, a staff honor recognizing a reporter’s storytelling ability. The National Commission Against Drunk Driving presented Long and a Tribune colleague its 2002 media award for a series of articles that led to the revocation of more than 3,000 licenses of drivers whose convictions, including 67 percent of the reckless homicide offenders in prison or on parole, had gone unrecorded in state driving records, allowing them to get back on the road. 

   Long and Tribune colleagues won the November 2008 national Capitolbeat first-place award for beat reporting. The Tribune cited Long for oustanding professional performance in 2002 during its annual award ceremonies for reporting on Illinois' special brand of pork-barrel spending and the 2009 William H. Jones Award for Investigative Reporting for a hard-edged team effort that foreshadowed the impeachment of Blagojevich.�@

Long has won numerous Peter Lisagor Awards from the Chicago Headline Club for individual and team reporting, including in 2010 for the Tribunes robust deadline reporting of Blagojevviich's removal from office.

Long was inducted into the Public Affairs Reporting Hall of Fame at the University of Illinois Springfield in 2008, and he was inducted into the journalism Hall of Fame at Eastern Illinois University, where he was co-winner of the school's reporter of the year award in 2009.

   He formerly ran The Associated Press bureau in Springfield; he covered Mayor Richard M. Daley, Chicago City Hall, Cook County Board, courts and state government for the Chicago Sun-Times; and he covered local, state and federal beats for the Peoria Journal Star. Long is president of the Illinois Legislative Correspondents Association, the press corps that covers the state capitol.