This reporting was supported by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting Illinois’ historic criminal justice reform law, hailed as a national model, contains a little-noticed loophole that seals statewide records of police misconduct and hides them from courts and the public. The new law requires the Illinois Law Enforcement and Training Standards Board to maintain…
Gateway talked to industry professionals and press associations in eight Midwestern states, including Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Illinois and Indiana. This story originally appeared in our spring 2021 issue. The following are some of the dispatches from these states. Missouri Mark Maassen takes umbrage with the University of North Carolina’s Hussman School of…
It could have been worse. Much worse. In fact, the executive director of the Missouri Press Association expected the COVID-19 pandemic to gut a local newspaper industry already reeling from more than a decade of competition from free digital content, rising newsprint costs and circulation declines. Seven of the state’s 200 or so newspapers ceased…
It is one of the more unlikely places – a rural community struggling to move on from its “sundown town” reputation – that a small, curious audience gathered recently at the Anna Arts Center to listen to Harry Dougherty’s freedom story. It was told by local historian and educator, Darrel Dexter, who first learned of…
In September 2018, racist flyers from a neo-Nazi group were left on cars parked at a community college in Southern Illinois. A few local news outlets reported on the incident and the college’s subsequent denouncement that followed. But then the story was mostly dropped until the next year when the same flyers from the same…