Reporter Jeff Kelly Lowenstein has left The Chicago Reporter to become a database and investigations editor at Hoy, the Chicago Tribune’s Spanish-language newspaper. Kelly Lowenstein spent more than five years at the Reporter covering labor/business and health. He produced award-winning investigations on Chicago police officers sued for wrongful deaths in controversial fatal shootings of civilians and exposed wide racial disparities in quality and staffing at nursing homes in Illinois and throughout the nation. His nursing home investigation helped spur legislative change in Illinois. He also produced exhaustive packages on Chicago’s struggles with race and segregation 40 years after Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1966 campaign in Chicago and the wide disparities in public education spending throughout Illinois. The Reporter will miss Kelly Lowenstein’s lively spirit, dogged reporting and undying love for data. We wish him the very best.
The Reporter has seven finalist entries in four categories of the Chicago Headline Club’s 2010 Peter S. Lisagor Awards. One of the seven nominations is in the best multimedia collaboration category. The other six nominations are spread among three awards: best in-depth reporting, best photography and best graphics in the magazine or magazine section, circulation less than 20,000 category. The awards will be announced at a dinner on Friday, May 6.
Noted author and legal scholar Michelle Alexander cites the Reporter in her award-winning book, “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.” Alexander twice cites “Black Offenders Face Stiffest Drug Sentences,” a January 2002 investigation where a Reporter analysis of 110,000 drug cases revealed that black defendants often received more severe penalties than white defendants even when they committed the same crimes and had similar criminal backgrounds.
The Reporter will have an exhibitor booth at the 2011 Green Festival Chicago. The event will be held from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. on Saturday, May 14, and from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. on Sunday, May 15, at McCormick Place’s Lakeside Center, 2301 S. Lake Shore Drive.