Newspapering was still a man’s world in the 1980s so I didn’t know what to make of my first female boss.

But a few things became obvious. She knew as much as I knew about how the city-that-works really works … and a lot more about the internal workings of the Chicago Tribune.

I was the younger by a few months, yet she had more energy, especially when making assignments. Her ideas could seem prosaic to a mid-career reporter, but she knew what had front page potential if aggressively and creatively pursued.

Most of all I remember her mastery of detail. Her election night staffing memoranda ran page after page, advising dozens of reporters and photographers where they needed to be, and by what exact minute they had to file so as to clear the copy desk in time to make our “final” edition.

Doping stories with her – the process by which reporters tell editors what they’ve got and editors tell reporters what they still need – was a game of 20 questions. But if you had the goods, she’d sell it hard at the 5 o’clock meeting where section editors offer their best stories for Page 1.

Ellen Soeteber had the goods. She moved up Tribune ranks as Metro editor, associate managing editor and deputy of the editorial page. The company sent her to South Florida to help run its newspaper there, yet none of us were surprised when later she was hired away as editor-in-chief of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. It was a homecoming of sorts, Ellen having graduated from East St. Louis High … a fact that gave her “street cred” in our city room … and one that helps explain her lifelong support of minority as well as female journalists.

Ellen Soeteber died last June on the same day as the passing of former Tribune editor and publisher Jack Fuller, one of her mentors. She would have appreciated the irony … and, were she running the news desk, would have risen to the challenge from an editor’s perspective. Run the obits the same day, giving bigger play to Fuller? Nah. Best to hold the Soeteber RIP for a day and give both the measured play they deserve. She was canny that way.

How canny? Back in ’83 she walked up to my desk and asked if I’d go to an old-time saloon near Comiskey Park – Schaller’s Pump to be exact – for a color piece on what locals thought of the White Sox finally making the playoffs. I groaned and eye-rolled … but agreed. Whereupon she asked if I’d also go to Baltimore that weekend for a feature on their stadium’s neighborhood. Had I turned her down on Schallers, another reporter would have enjoyed those expense account crab cakes and playoff tickets.

Then there were all those Saturday mornings, 7 a.m. shift, chasing stories for the Sunday final. Often the big whoop was arrival around 9 a.m. of a stack of the Chicago Sun-Times “bulldog” Sunday edition. Almost always the competition bannered a Page 1 screamer about some investigation or revelation the Trib didn’t have. So Ellen always bought coffee for the copy kid who distributed those papers, and in return he or she agreed to delay delivering a copy to the office of Sunday Editor Bill Jones. She used those precious minutes to evaluate the competition’s story and outline a strategy to either “knock-down” or “recover” the S-T bombshell. I don’t think Jones, another fine editor who died too soon, ever caught on.

In such ways were trails blazed for women in the newsroom. Yet she paid a price, as all pioneers do. There were those damnable cigarettes and other nervous ticks. Of course there were. She asked herself to be twice-as-good and, more often than not, she pulled it off. Not long after Ellen moved on, one of her mentees, Anne Marie Lipinski, became the Tribune’s first female editor-in-chief.

Newspapering has its problems, sure, but thanks to Ellen and her professional sisters, it is no longer a man’s world … and much the better for it.

Author’s note:  Following 27 years at the Trib, John McCarron now teachers, consults and writes on urban affairs.

Postscript:  A number of Ellen’s colleagues and friends from the Trib, Sun-Sentinal and Post-Dispatch are making gifts in her memory to the Alfred Friendly Foundation, which brings aspiring third-world journalists to the U.S. to see how we do it here. Ellen was a board member and brought lots of Friendly fellows into the newsrooms she led. You can donate online at http://presspartners.org/support/individual-gifts/ or send a check to: Alfred Friendly Press Partners; 310C Reynolds Journalism Institute, Columbia, MO  65211.

Questions?   Email jackie.combs.nelson@gmail.com

There’s nothing like a bitter teachers’ strike – and one chockablock with national ideo-politico implications – to bring out the best, and not-so-best, in the newsrooms of the Midwest’s largest media market.

Initial coverage of the seven-day Chicago teachers strike largely consisted of by-the-numbers spot news and predictable sidebars of the kind assistant city editors reflexively assign.

“STRIKE” screamed the tab Sun-Times in 18-pica bold Sept.10, the morning after Chicago Teachers Union negotiators rejected the school board’s last offer, sending 26,000 teachers to the picket lines and 350,000 students to – where?

That was one staple of Day 1 strike coverage: Where to send the kids if you’re a working mother? Others included the potential impact on prep football schedules, and whether Mayor Rahm Emanuel should have stayed in Chicago negotiating during the previous week instead of preening before party faithful at the Democratic National Committee convention in Charlotte.

These first stories were done capably enough, though it wasn’t until the next day’s print editions, and that night’s public radio and TV panel discussions, that the rest of us got some real insight into what really was going on behind closed doors.

It likely took those 48 hours for editors to stop acting like firehouse dogs – Hat! Coat! Talk to parents! – and start listening closely to their beat reporters.

Beat reporters. Remember them? Big newsrooms used to have rows of them, plus those stationed remotely at “building beats,” such as police headquarters and criminal courts. They were tasked with developing real sources and mastering the details of complex urban systems.

But with the collapse of print’s business model and consequent downsizing of staff, too many of these beats have disappeared or been telescoped into broad catch-alls such as “women’s issues” or “politics.”

Fortunately, Chicago’s two metro dailies still have genuine education writers – Diane Rado and Noreen Ahmed-Ullah at the Tribune, Rosalind Rossi at the Sun-Times – who managed, after the initial “Oh, my God!” din, to point out that, ta-dah: Money was not the main issue. The school board was ready early on to come through with 4 percent annual raises, though it remains to be seen how they’ll pay for it.

It turned out the strike primarily was about impending layoffs. Specifically, it was about which teachers would be losing their jobs as more and more underperforming and half-empty inner-city public schools are closed – and as more and more non-union charter schools are opened.

If there was a true scoop during two weeks of breathless blanket coverage, it was the Trib’s front-page revelation – a triple byline affair led by Ahmed-Ullah – that the Emanuel administration is quietly planning to close up to 120 of the system’s 600 schools and open 60 additional publicly funded (but privately managed) non-union charter schools over the next five years.

Much of the story was based on an obscure but finely detailed grant application that Chicago Public Schools submitted recently to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

It was this revelation – that the strike was really about the rapid advance of charter schools, and how the shrinking public system intended to evaluate which teachers would stay and which go – that gave the story true national sweep.

Most big-city public school systems, after all, are dealing with similar dilemmas. Business and civic leaders are constantly calling for reform. Of course they are: Nearly half of Chicago public school students are dropping out of high school before graduation – and many of those who do graduate are unable to read an instructional manual, much less navigate a mechanical blueprint or enterprise software.

Business and civic reformers have been quick to blame incompetent but union-protected teachers. In Chicago they’ve been loudly supported by the Tribune’s editorial page, which has long thundered against the impossibly complex rules governing the firing of teachers and a pay system that rewards longevity rather than educational results.

Adding to the story’s national scope is the fact that President Obama has supported expansion of charters, which tap about two-thirds of their funding from public school budgets but need not abide by union work rules and pay scales. The president’s secretary of education, Arne Duncan, pushed the idea while serving as chief executive officer of Chicago schools under former Mayor Richard M. Daley. And the Obama administration’s signature school reform initiative, “Race to the Top,” counts charters among the innovations local districts can implement to win competitively awarded federal grants.

Then again, public employee unions, of which teachers’ unions are a huge faction, have been reliable supporters of the Democratic Party. Yet here was Emanuel, a former White House chief-of-staff and national Democratic fundraiser extraordinaire, going toe-to-toe with the CTU and its hard-line leader Karen Lewis.

It’s little wonder that Stephanie Banchero, a former Tribune education writer, had no trouble winning front-page play, day after day, for her insightful coverage of the strike for the Wall Street Journal. The lede of her end-of-strike story Sept. 19 called the Chicago dispute emblematic of “the intensifying national debate over how teachers are evaluated, hired and fired.”

On the jump page she even squeezed in details of the key compromise on teacher evaluations. A teacher’s students’ scores on standardized tests will be weighted at 25 percent, 30 percent and 35 percent in successive years of the new four-year contract. Moreover, when a school is closed, even teachers with so-so evaluations will be given advanced standing for rehiring by principals at surviving schools. This was a win for the union because Emanuel and the school board, led by banker David Vitale, had insisted that school principals, who are to be held accountable for academic results, be given near-total control over hiring.

Few media outlets delved so deeply into the arcana of teacher evaluation formulas, hiring criterion and pay scales. The television O-and-Os relied mainly on fresh daily video of boisterous, red-shirted teachers on the picket lines carrying “Shame on Rahm” signs. (And, of course, news-you-can-use mini-features on temporary daycare opportunities.)

Leave it to Chicago’s WBEZ (91.5 FM) public radio to organize several more-than-you-ever-thought-you-wanted-to-know seminars on teacher evaluation, test scores and – importantly in a system where four of five students come from low-income minority families – the poverty/achievement link. Not everyone wants to spend afternoons listening to radio host Steve Edwards interview national experts on the nexus between poverty, test results and the proposition that better teachers can significantly move the needle.

But it’s good to know Chicago’s media milieu is rich enough that folks interested in root causes can get insights such as those offered by one of Edwards’ expert guests. Education researcher and author Paul Tough explained that “chaotic, unstable, violent and difficult” home environments tend to produce in children a “toxic stress” that stunts formation of the “executive function skills” crucial for success in school.

Good schools and better teachers are important, sure. But the educational crisis afflicting Chicago and America’s other major cities won’t be solved by jiggering teacher evaluations, or even by opening more charter schools.

Good beat reporters doubtless get this. Let’s hope they’re still around to explain it to the rest of us.

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Some of my best friends are investigative reporters, so what follows is argued with no small amount of trepidation.

My friends are a bit thin-skinned, you see, because their work is constantly criticized by those they investigate. But they are the stars of our profession, so they almost never get criticized by those of us stationed elsewhere along journalism’s far-flung ranks.

But here goes:  My friends, you are being played.

Most of your investigations are aimed at and focused upon the foibles of government — all levels of government — so effectively that most Americans now harbor a deep distrust of the public sector. You have prepared the garden, my friends, from which now sprouts the Tea Party, Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin and any number of Libertarians out to free America from the tyranny of Washington and Big Government.

This is no small achievement. And for this service your publisher or your station owner or your holding company’s board of directors ought to thank you. But they never will, for that would give the game away. You are idealists, after all, and you can’t stand being played.

I’m amazed you haven’t figured this out on your own. I’m talking about you hard-eyed nerds who comb through the classifieds every morning looking for public notices — of  prospective zoning changes, say, or  liquor license applications — that might signal some conflict-of-interest at City Hall. I’m talking about wily wonks who every three months, like clockwork, race to the county clerk’s
office or the state board of elections to grab those precious D-2 filings listing campaign contributors to elected officials and wannabes.

You don’t miss much, my investigative friends. Except, that is, the widespread and growing public cynicism about government that you have worked so diligently, if unwittingly, to create.

Mind you, I allege no conspiracy here, only a convergence of forces and circumstances that comfortably suit the powers that really be.

Forces? For one thing, investigating the public sector has become much easier than investigating the private. The federal government and virtually all the states now have on their books some version of an Open Meetings Act and a Freedom of Information Act.  This is good. Public dealings should be transparent.

Then again, one unintended consequence of open meetings laws has been to turn most official gatherings into stage-managed productions, the actual give-and-take of decision-making having been removed to cloakrooms or in camera one-to-ones or phone calls.

Among public officials there is now widespread distaste for making decisions in front of gotcha-obsessed journalists — journalists who may not understand the difference between a revenue bond and a general-obligation bond, or between a tax rate and tax levy, but who are more than willing to assign the worst possible motives to whatever is decided.

All those FOIA requests, meanwhile, have largely replaced the development of actual live sources as the basic tool of investigative reporting.  Today’s newsroom ethos is such that the cultivation of person-to-person relationships with public officials is generally considered a questionable practice. Gone is the “backgrounder” lunch or cup-of-coffee at which Mr. or Ms. Official explains what the real issues and influences are.

Better instead to stand off and dun public agencies with FOIA requests seeking expense accounts, or contract bids,
or consultancy agreements or whatever.  Even a green reporter can find something in the return mail that will spark public indignation.

As an indirect result of these conveniences, press coverage of our most complex societal issues — the problems of public education, say, or the construction and maintenance of public infra-structure — is increasingly crowded out by stories listing the names of school district superintendents earning six-figure salaries or of construction executives donating money to certain campaign funds.

All of this is fair game.  But the reader or viewer is left inevitably with the jaded view that school superintendents responsible for the education and safety of thousands of kids don’t deserve that $200,000, or that the main purpose of public works “pork” is to pad the political war chests of public officials.

If the news stories don’t sufficiently drive home these points, news columnists and editorial writers are sure to follow up — in the tradition of Chicago’s late Mike Royko — with even darker insinuations.

Another reason the public sector gets hammered by the press more than the private sector, (a reason almost never discussed at academic media conferences or panels) is the double standard that is U.S. law governing libel.

The average media consumer doesn’t understand, though virtually all media owners, publishers and senior editors assuredly do, that it’s almost impossible to libel a public official or public servant.  Ever since the landmark United States Supreme Court ruling of 1964 (New York Times Co. v. Sullivan) and lesser subsequent decisions, any public official claiming libel and seeking damages must first prove the journalist and/or publisher knew in advance  the libelous information was false. In First Amendment law, this is called “actual malice.”

In reality it is virtually impossible to prove.

Not so when journalists report on the private sector, whether

it’s a giant utility that cooks its books to get a rate increase or a surgeon who bills Medicare for more procedures than are humanly possible. Private plaintiffs can win judgments and collect damages — sometimes enough to bankrupt a reporter’s employer — if they merely show the reporting was untrue and that it cost them dearly.

This sets up a pernicious but seldom-mentioned choice made every day, at least subliminally, by city editors and assignment desks in newsrooms across America: Should I assign my scarce investigative resources to, say, verify consumer complaints about out-of-date perishables being sold at our local chain supermarket?  Or should I have them go once again to City Hall and pull this month’s files on who’s getting the juicy consulting contracts?

When cautious editors consider the grief that could come from going after the private sector, the choice is a no-brainer.  Witness the ABC-TV editors who in 1992 okayed a couple of reporters hiring on at a North Carolina supermarket . . . only to see the network hit later by a $5.5 million verdict from a jury that decided such an undercover maneuver constitutes fraud. It’s true the mega-bucks award in Food Lion v. Capital Cities/ABC was struck down on appeal.

But who needs the annoyance, especially if readers or viewers would be just as entertained by the standard photo-spread about city workers loafing on the job. Even when a private company’s misdeeds can no longer be ignored, journalistic heat is more apt to be aimed at the government agency that was supposed to regulate them. Plane crashes and near-misses are laid at the feet of the FAA; fatal mining accidents are traced to lax inspection by OSHA or the Bureau of Mines; unsafe car brakes should have been detected and ordered fixed by the NHTSA.

Add it all up and it’s easy to understand why a large and growing segment of the voting public now thinks government is both stealing us blind and laying down on the job. We live now an Age of Anger. People are mad-as-hell about the way things are, about why gas costs $4-a-gallon and why their kids can’t find a decent job. And from what they’ve been reading in the papers and watching on TV, there’s little doubt about who’s to blame. Those anti-government zealots on talk radio surely must have it right.  And to some extent, they are right.

Public sector employee benefits have, in many cases, gotten out of line with those available on the private side. There are too many surly, clock-watching clerks at the DMV and not enough police when you need them. Taxes are too high on working families and too many folks on food stamps are buying stuff the rest of us can’t afford.

But does this mean the private sector – the sector led by those “free men and free markets” the Libertarians swear by – ought to be trusted to call more of the shots?  Should government back off and simply allow “the market” to decide where to drill for oil, where to move the factories and the jobs, where to book their equipment sales and record their stock options so as to minimize taxes?

There is no shortage of politicians now ascending who argue this, indeed, is the way America must go.  And they can point to scandal-after-public-sector-scandal, dutifully reported by the media to make their case (And all the while, with straight faces, also complain the country suffers at the hands of a “liberal” media.) Then again, I offer no hard proof that this is what’s going on. It’s not an organized conspiracy. There is no paper trail.

But as an urban affairs writer I watched the sub-prime mortgage crisis unfold over the past decade. I saw inner-city neighborhoods all-but-destroyed by fast-buck mortgage brokers and the Wall Street debt re-packagers. And I  watch now as the revisionist Right tries to blame the entire catastrophe on Fannie, Freddie, the FHA and even the federal Community Reinvestment Act.

There is a grain of truth to these assertions, but only a grain. If our mainstream journalism were better, such charges would be shown to be as crazy as Roswell UFOs or cold fusion. For that matter, if our journalism were as it should be, the entire sub-prime scam would have been exposed and stopped before collapsing of its own weight in the fall of 2008 with the failure of Lehman Brothers and bail-outs of the rest.  But that didn’t happen. That kind of journalism, especially that kind of investigative journalism, was too hard and too risky. So the scam went on and on until the crash, and only now, after it’s too late, are the best-seller lists filling with quasi-investigative post-mortems — stories based largely on the work of state attorneys general and a blue-ribbon Congressional commission.

Duped bond investors, meanwhile, are seeking billions in compensation from the big Wall Street investment houses via civil litigation. But the debt-busted families and foreclosure-ravaged neighborhoods, where do they go?

These are the people and the places our investigators are supposed to protect.  And yet, too many of the sub-prime “perps” are back in business, collecting their commissions and year-end bonuses . . . even as too many reporters are back to making their lists of overpaid school superintendents.

John McCarron is a freelance urban affairs writer and adjunct lecturer at DePaul University’s School of Communication. Previously he worked 27 years for the Chicago Tribune as reporter, financial editor and member of the editorial board.