Earlier this week, a friend of Chicago Tribune investigative reporter Christy Gutowski was walking past her 22-year-old daughter’s bedroom and heard Gutowski’s voice. Gutowski hadn’t stopped for a visit, however. Her voice was coming from a podcast the news outlet launched in an attempt to reach a younger demographic of its in-depth reporting. The eight-episode…
Lexi Cortes got her first taste of investigative reporting at her college newspaper. When writing for the Alestle at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, Cortes discovered major contradictions in the school administration’s statements regarding the closure of the school’s museum. She was hooked. Cortes now writes for the Belleville News-Democrat, where she recently reported on two…
Monica Seals didn’t waste time. Within 24 hours after the nonprofit ProPublica Illinois and the Chicago Tribune published an investigation revealing the widespread practice of putting children into solitary confinement in school districts in Illinois, the Centralia radio reporter pressed local officials for answers. Seals, news director at the Withers Broadcasting station in the Southern…
BY GEORGE SALAMON / Just this past Sunday journalism’s unceasing debate on anonymous sources reared its head again. In the October 13 Sunday Review section of The New York Times Margaret Sullivan, the paper’s fifth public editor, wrote about “The Disconnect on Anonymous Sources.” Dan Okrent, first public editor from 2003 to 2005, confronted the same issue during his tenure. Even then, novelist and New York magazine columnist Kurt Andersen had already had enough: “…the customary righteousness, disingenuousness, futility and wonky tedium of such debates are for me almost unbearable.”