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…
The indictment of Julian Assange for leaking national security secrets poses a serious challenge to the First Amendment’s protection of the right of the press to publish stories on the most important of news events. Assange is the first self-styled journalist to be charged with violating the century-old Espionage Act, an overbroad law passed in…
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…
Like many statehouse press corps, the one in Illinois is a fraction of what it used to be. Since the legislative session started this year, about a dozen reporters, including interns, have been assigned to cover what’s going on in the Illinois capital. A decade ago, there were 30 full-time statehouse press reporters in Springfield…
Media coverage of violence on the Chicago’s south and west sides is both a symptom and a factor in Chicago’s historic segregation, and one with political and social ramifications felt across the city. In the national media, Chicago is a poster child for “black on black violence,” a one-sided framing of violent crime in disinvested…