It was a hell of a way to go out. In their final investigation for the Belleville News-Democrat, one of Illinois’ top investigative reporting duos found that East St. Louis was not only one of the deadliest cities in America, it also had one of the lowest rates for solving murders. Through meticulous reporting that…
Jackie Serrato, now a journalist at the Chicago Reporter, a non-profit founded in 1972, entered the industry determined and untrained. She had started a Facebook page to share local news from an Hispanic neighborhood on Chicago’s West Side and to give residents a platform to discuss issues facing the Little Village neighborhood. But Serrato was…
Media coverage of violence on the Chicago’s south and west sides is both a symptom and a factor in Chicago’s historic segregation, and one with political and social ramifications felt across the city. In the national media, Chicago is a poster child for “black on black violence,” a one-sided framing of violent crime in disinvested…
On election night in late February in the East Pilsen neighborhood of Chicago, about 100 supporters and family members of mayoral candidate Amara Enyia gathered on the first floor of the Blue Lacuna workspace to wait for the results. Even though Enyia was a long shot candidate in a race that ultimately produced Chicago’s first…
In 2009, a team of researchers and students at Northwestern University developed software that fully automates the writing of baseball game recaps. StatsMonkey relies on publicly available data, like box scores, and a series of pre-written partial story templates. It can analyze a team’s changing probability of winning, play by play, find important moments from…