Monica Seals didn’t waste time. Within 24 hours after the nonprofit ProPublica Illinois and the Chicago Tribune published an investigation revealing the widespread practice of putting children into solitary confinement in school districts in Illinois, the Centralia radio reporter pressed local officials for answers. Seals, news director at the Withers Broadcasting station in the Southern…
I want to tell you a story about covering Congress in 2002 that doesn’t feel that long ago but my 18-year-old students at Columba College in Chicago would assure me otherwise. I wasn’t too much older than that when I started working for The Washington Post after graduate school. I was young, ambitious, serious and…
A recent study by the nonprofit media and culture group Define American and the MIT Center for Civic Media found that major newspapers have adopted President Trump’s rhetoric for immigration, using language and labels like “illegal immigrant” to describe people working or residing in the United States without a visa or permit. The New York…
For many of us who have spent our careers in print journalism, it’s easy (though grossly unfair) to blame TV news–and particularly its pundits, for the credibility crisis we find ourselves in. TV needs slick visuals. TV needs drama. TV has its watcher-in-chief who also likes to tweet, and those tweets make for good TV…
Just days before the 4th of July holiday, the DuQuoin Weekly in Southern Illinois got a tip that the country music band, Confederate Railroad, would no longer be playing at the DuQuoin State Fair in August. At first it appeared like a typical scheduling conflict, which wouldn’t have been much of a story. But earlier…