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…
The body of a small boy lies face down on the wet sand, the cold water lapping around him. In another scene, a mother runs from plumes of thick gas, her hands holding tightly to her two children. These images of three-year-old Alan Kurdi and 39-year-old Maria Lila Meza Castro are often the only representation…
As a young photojournalist just a few years out of college, Jason Howell was finally settling down. He had a full-time staff job at the Journal Gazette and Times-Courier in eastern Illinois and had just signed a year-long lease on an apartment in Charleston. As the only staff photographer at a paper that dates back…
Maybe it was naive to think it would never happen or wouldn’t happen so soon. But on May 6, two months after I moved to start a new job as a staff photojournalist, I was laid off from the Journal Gazette & Times-Courier in Mattoon. I had been the only photojournalist at that Lee Enterprises…
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…