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January, 2013
In the summer of 1975, Stephan Garnett was fresh out of college and in his first journalism job at The Chicago Reporter. He was assigned to investigate the Chicago Park District’s funding practices.He soon ran into an obstacle: The district would release data on the number of seesaws or soccer fields in the parks--but not how much money went to each park.So he followed the advice of Reporter...
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January, 2012
Robert J. Quinn’s tenure as commissioner of the Chicago Fire Department spanned the Daley Machine era. Quinn took over the department in 1957, two years into Mayor Richard J. Daley’s first term. His subsequent 21 years in office made him a Chicago institution in his own right. Today, the city’s fire academy bears his name as a tribute.But the beginning and end of Quinn’s career were marked...
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January, 2013
It was just three paragraphs, but the conclusion of Sharon McGowan’s 1976 school funding investigation caused a political stir in Illinois.McGowan had discovered that $85.5 million in federal funding earmarked to help Chicago’s 212,434 “poverty children” in the 1974-75 school year had been instead spent for general purposes throughout the public school district. The fund, created by Title I of...
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January, 2013
Kimbriell Kelly joined The Chicago Reporter in 2004 as a Robert R. McCormick Tribune Minority Fellow in Urban Journalism. Her 2007 story on mortgage lending practices eventually led to multimillion-dollar settlements between the State of Illinois and two of the country’s major lending forces: Countrywide Financial Corporation and Wells Fargo and Company. During Kelly’s eight years at the Reporter...
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November, 2012
The news: In September, the Chicago Teachers Union called a strike for the first time in 25 years, bringing renewed attention to organized labor in Illinois.Behind the news: During the past decade, Illinois lost the third highest number of union members in the country, behind Michigan and Ohio, from 1,013,000 in 2001 to 876,000 in 2011, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. But...
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November, 2012
The news: The funding and use of Medicare and Medicaid have been a divisive issue during the 2012 presidential debates.Behind the news: According to the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, public spending on medical programs—such as Medicare and the Children’s Health Insurance Program—increased 89 percent in Illinois since welfare reform in 1994, averaging $3,143 per person in 2010, the latest year...
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