Illinois is the first state to require a media literacy unit as part of the annual curriculum for high school students. Educators are spending this year adjusting and developing their lesson plans accordingly, which advocates say will establish a new standard for US public education. Beginning next fall, students will be exposed to the following…
Bill Recktenwald had a list of accolades to his name, including finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. After a storied career in journalism, he went on to teach future journalists as a senior lecturer at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. Recktenwald, or Reck as he was known, eventually became president of the Faculty Senate. He did…
Eighty-one Chicago police officers lost their badges over the past 20 years, but only after being investigated for 1,706 previous offenses – an average of 21 accusations per officer. One third (28) of these Chicago officers were investigated for domestic altercations or sexual misconduct. Two murdered their wives. That statistical picture emerges from records obtained…
For nearly a decade, an archived collection of photographs from the Chicago Sun-Times newspaper seemed lost forever, first to a convicted embezzler and then later to an eBay collector who put them in storage in the boyhood hometown of Ronald Reagan. The photographs, captured by Sun-Times photojournalists over six decades, include a 1991 photo of…
Reporter Kallie Cox has sat through more school board meetings, city council meetings and community forums for the Southern Illinoisan and Daily Egyptian newspapers than she can count. But the last time she attended a meeting in person was a year ago. At the forum, there was a whiteboard, and after the meeting was over,…