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January, 2013
Shortly after The Chicago Reporter published its latest investigation into mortgage lending practices in 2007, it received a call from an unexpected place: Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan’s office.Madigan was interested in the Reporter’s data analysis that showed high-cost loans were being steered disproportionately toward African-American and Latino applicants. She used the Reporter’s...
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January, 2013
When Sarah Karp looks back on her 2000 investigation into Illinois’ juvenile transfer law, what she remembers is a series of images: 15- and 16-year-olds walking into criminal courtrooms at 26th Street and California Avenue, where they were being tried as adults. She couldn’t help but think they seemed completely out of place.“You’d just feel like, ‘Now, that’s a baby at that age, and yet they’re...
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January, 2013
Its one-mile oval of green turf sits beneath a clear blue sky, eliciting an elegant appearance and experience. But the Arlington International Racecourse in Chicago’s Northwest suburbs had a secret, and it wasn’t pretty.Danielle Gordon took an official tour of Arlington’s pristine grounds on the suspicion that something was awry. Instead of spending the hour on the sanctioned route, she changed...
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January, 2013
Ann Grimes and Laura S. Washington were no strangers to taking on a challenging project, but when TV producer Scott Craig asked The Chicago Reporter to collaborate with him on a full-scale investigation into Chicago Public Schools, the duo found that it was trying from the get-go.The task: Find an “average” Chicago high school. Not the best, nor the worst, to paint a fair depiction of the city’s...
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January, 2013
In November, a federal jury ordered the City of Chicago to pay $850,000 in damages to Karolina Obrycka, a bartender who was beaten in 2007 by off-duty Chicago police officer Anthony Abbate. The beating had been captured by surveillance video: Abbate pushed Obrycka to the ground and repeatedly punched and kicked her after she stopped him from going behind the bar.The video was sensational enough,...
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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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