When their billionaire owner abruptly closed Chicago’s DNAInfo in 2017, three former editors decided to build a different kind.
CHICAGO – Back in the early ’70s, as a cub working off the overnight city desk at the Chicago Tribune, you learned fast that all murders were not equal. Sure, all were listed methodically on the deputy superintendent’s logbook at the old police headquarters at 11th and State streets. But while killings on the city’s predominantly white North Side were almost always pursued by our small band of nocturnal newsmen, the more numerous homicides in the black neighborhoods of the South and West Sides most often were ignored. There was even a winking code word for the latter category. They were “blue.” Blue, as in “cheap domestic,” where a drunken live-in boyfriend kills his common-law mate. Blue, as in someone shot in the face after a street-corner dice game gone awry. Judging by how the other four daily newspapers (yes, four!) covered and displayed their homicides, it’s safe to assume the same double standard applied.
On Jan. 8, 1978, the first of a 25-part investigative series published by the Chicago Sun-Times about corruption in Chicago hit the newsstands. Thirty-five years have passed, but the series is still talked about – not so much as to what was reported, but how it was reported, and its impact not on the crooks that were exposed, but on reporting methods.
Illinois’ toughest in the nation eavesdropping law is partly unenforceable now that a Chicago prosecutor failed to persuade the U.S. Supreme Court to revive the law. Citizens now can make an audio tape of Chicago police making a stop without fear of prosecution. The taping of police stops is part of an ACLU of Illinois program scrutinizing police conduct.
The Chicago Headline Club – the largest local chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists in the country –.
