Monday, October 19, 2009
Media / News Bites So We're Still a Two-Newspaper Town! An Idea About What They Should Be Doing
Posted by Michael Miner on 10.19.09 at 09:13 AM
A note arrived the other day from Paul O'Connor, former Royko legman, Channel 11 reporter, and executive director of World Business Chicago. The last time we'd talked, Chicago seemed to be on its way to becoming a one-newspaper city, which O'Connor said then would define the city to a foreign business executive as a small town "in a number of ways, none of which makes Chicago more attractive as a place to live . . . or as a place to invest corporate capital."
But the Sun-Times just got a new lease on life. And O'Connor, whose mind is always churning, seems less concerned these days about what foreigners think of the Chicago press than about what Chicagoans think of it. O'Connor had seen the video of Derrion Albert being beaten to death last month near Fenger High, where he was an honor student, and thinking hard about what happened. O'Connor wrote:
Now that it is looking like we'll have two newspapers, I am writing to tell them what to do: Cops.
It's time to get back to covering the city, and that means sending reporters onto the streets again. Onto the dangerous streets.
We've had years of honors students' head shots on the front page — stray bullets, random kills. It's a perennial story: Decent kids, second-day photo of the flowers on the stoop; sound bites from crushed and angry relatives.
But I do not think I have ever read in the Sun-Times or the Tribune a description of these routine fire fights that result in the front-page death of a young innocent.
The air must suddenly go out of these residential blocks of random terror, as the deafening punctuation of a blur of pistol reports thicken the air, eyes confused with fire flashes from the muzzles of the punks' handguns in crossfire. Ever read about that in your newspaper? That¹d be a helluva read, a must-read, as they said in the olden days.
Neighborhoods sparking into combat zones seem to be a daily occurrence.
What's it like to live out there? How often do the working stiffs in the fire-zone neighborhoods hear gun fire? How do they negotiate the sidewalks: what do they watch out for to stay alive? Do they keep a constant eye out for where they can duck to? Because it seems like it's the sweet naïve kids that don't duck fast enough — not the savvier grownups — who end up on the front page in headshots.
Now we have a Rodney King video moment, in which teenage Lord of the Flies savagery shows a kid beaten to death. Yeah, the newspapers say, another decent kid, the kind of grandchild you hope for. The president blows a whistle, and the nation's top cop comes to town with Arne Duncan — the only one of a dozen talking heads who tries to tell what it's like out there: Telling the press conference they can scarcely understand what it is like for the kids out there on our streets.
But that's what the newspapers are supposed to be telling us: What it's like out there on our city streets.
The videoed murder is a gang-turf thing. That's the explanation. Fine. What gangs? What turf?
Reporters don't have to leave the comfort of their desks to tell us the names of the gangs. No right-to-know newspaper man has to set foot onto the deadly streets of our town to get the information to draw a
map. Show us the map of gang turfs, with the gangs names on their turf. Show us the maps where the turfs are disputed. Put the high schools on the gang-turf map.
Give the aldermen a map so they have to get off their fat asses and scream at City Council. Give the neighborhoods a map so they can scream at their alderman. Give the editorial page editors a map so they can give the Muscleman Superintendent a spanking.
How many gang gun fights were there last night? What do you mean you don't know?
How many rounds of ammo do you think are illegally discharged in the City of Chicago in a week? What do you mean "you have no idea?"
Maybe the [management information services] folks at Police Headquarters should be required to GIS fire fights in real time, and maybe the Times' and Trib's websites would be willing to offer a neighborhood gun fire landing page. If not, maybe MacArthur or the Chicago Community Trust would pay for the people's right to know what is going on on the streets of this city.
Covering the story of gun-blasting gangs is the newspapers' job. Not anybody else's. They could use the cops' help to do it, it would be easier that way. . . . But the papers don't need the cops to give us the facts we need, the color of the heartbreak, the contours of the kill zones, the economics of the gangs, the personalities and lifestyles of their bosses, a taste of the lawless swagger and the stink of fear and gun powder, the heaviness of the silence after the tires screech away.
The papers and what passes for television news have been "cheaping out" the deaths of children killed because if enough punks fire enough bullets one is bound to hit someone, and little kids are easily killed with big bullets.
Either the newspapers' reporters are afraid to get hurt, which is a reasonable fear, or the story of Chicago's bleeding streets isn¹t news because it only affects the nobodies, the losers, those people.
If our two big dailies don't cover this story, there is no way this situation will change. This is a job for the people, not just City Hall. And the people have the right to take back their streets. But they cannot do that without a thorough grasp of the facts on the ground. The people have a right to know who is doing what where and why on the streets of their city.
Police reporting is the most basic of journalism's basics. And it is time for the business to go back to basics.
Ironically, if the papers take on Chicago's bleeding streets and the thugs who rule them, they will start selling newspapers again, and winning Pulitzer Prizes, maybe even the Heywood Broun Award.
But as of today, this town's biggest story remains untold. And the mournful drumbeat of sappy front-page weepers about sweet dead children being killed randomly is no way to report on what the hell is going on out
there.
We've got two surviving big city dailies. It's time they started acting like it. It's time for the Chicago Sun-Times and the Chicago Tribune to compete head-to-head on the streets of our city. To do their jobs, and give us the coverage we need to take back our streets. If they don't have the stomach for it — because what I am asking for takes precious few "resources" (only editorial management that gives a shit and a cityside crew with the guts to take it on) — then maybe whether they themselves live or die isn't that relevant to the life of the city after all.
"The Gantlet" was a September 16 Tribune feature "chronicling" the commutes of six Chicago students to and from their high schools. It was less than O'Connor is calling for, but it did get some reporters out into the streets, and some kids into our attention spans.
Comments (10)
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Hmm, my comment has mysteriously disappeared.
With rants like that, O'Connor should have a blog in Rogers Park. It's full of profanity, a couple of good ideas, some logical flaws, and no follow-through.
Let's fact-check the statement that Chicago is a two-paper town. Why does O'Connor leave out the Reader, and why does the Reader accept that? Any paper could do this gang-mapping, not just the Sun-Times and the Trib. There are the Southtown Star and the Dziennik Zwiazkowy, as well as many others. One needn't be a "big" paper to do good work - La Raza had the finest original reporting in the city in the late 1990s, early 2000s, IMHO.
So if you like O'Connor's idea, get to work!
like
dislike
I have to disagree somewhat with O'Connor; I think we *do* know how much gunfire and mayhem are out there. EveryBlock is one of the best-known Web sites in the journalism community and presents that sort of data in an easily browsable format, and even RedEye has done data-gathering on crime. What I think people don't understand are the causes - or maybe they do understand and don't know how to address them, or don't care to.
Here's an idea! Let's do more stories on the Chicago Mob. Oh wait, that's right, the Chicago Mob now owns the Sun-Times.
What the hell was I thinking?
Whet,
You think people understand the causes of violence in Chicago? I read everything I can about it, know about as much about the statistical patterns as any layman, and I'm not sure I have more than some vague clues. Do you think you understand the causes?
I once suggested to the Reader a piece looking into the causes of the truly incredible *decrease* in violence in the last decade, most of which happened virtually overnight in 2003 and 2004. I was told it would be ho-hum, why would anyone read it. I found that astonishing. Ideas don't always spark with people, and I may not have presented it well.
But most people know that we live in a city that is in fact incredibly safer compared with the 30 years that came before 2003. Though the demographics have hardly changed, it's essentially a different city.
How could anyone understand the causes of violence if they don't even recognize the changes in violence?
Meanwhile, yes, you're right, many reporters and some citizens probably browse the raw data of EveryBlock. If anyone has contextualized it in a newspaper, I haven't seen it.
Sigh, I meant to write "most people DON'T know we live in a safer ..."
The new comments format is better than the old one, but I still feel it doesn't allow you to see very much of what you're typing while you're typing it. Still, I should proof better before posting.
I don't know. Back in the 1980s the Los Angeles Times did a series on gangs in LA, complete with maps showing gang territories and how they planned to expand. And the paper caught holy hell for the effort.
In Chicago, you'd be graphically laying out the city's no-go, free-fire zones. Talk about red-lining. Can you imagine the howls from community leaders: "You're making us look like monsters, you're painting our neighborhood as some kind of bullet-riddled urban South Waziristan!"
As for boots-on-the-ground reporting, you'd have to equip reporters with flak jackets and helmets. Wouldn't that be a lovely public-relations gesture?
That said, I'm not so sure it shouldn't be done. But the result might not be a constructive one. Rather than inspiring compassion and a sense of urgency among the middle-class target readership, it might instead generate revulsion, horror and hunkering down.
Given the state of the economy and the nation--layoffs, wage clawbacks, the permanent imposition of a Third-World-style economy and, incidentally, war as far as the eye can see--what are the odds that another dose of bad news, this time emanating from our local ganglands rather than Wall Street, will lead to anything good?
@ryan:
"You think people understand the causes of violence in Chicago? I read everything I can about it, know about as much about the statistical patterns as any layman, and I'm not sure I have more than some vague clues."
May have overstated somewhat - should say there are a lot of theories, but perhaps not "causes."
@ryan - mostly just trying to point out that O'Connor seems to be saying that what we need is more raw data about crime, but IMO we're swimming in that.
Whet,
I cannot imagine you truly believe that the police reports (which, of course, is really the only source of anything that would be on Everyblock) provides comprehensive and accurate raw data on crime. Does Everyblock provide the names of all the gangs and the territory they control? I don't visit that site very often but I doubt it. I'm sure you are fully aware that only a tiny sliver of the amount of crime that occurs will ever make it into a police report. Undoubtadly, the overwhelming majority of crime is never reported. That is even more true in high crime areas where there is fear of retaliation if people talk to the police. Even when something is reported it isn't neccessarally going to make it into a police report. Not to mention, how exactly things are catagorized as crimes is a subjective decision and, from what I understand, is often influenced by politics. I highly suggest you watch the TV series The Wire (I am pretty convinced from your post that you have not done so already). It goes into many of these things in-depth and comes from the perspective of people who spent many years observing inner-city neighborhoods from a variety of vantage points.
And I don't really think the main thing that O'Connor was advocating was the gathering of more raw crime numbers. He is suggesting that reporters should go into the inner-city and attempt to understand the dynamics that exist there. Then, when they are reporting on crimes that occur they can really describe how they affect the lives of the people who live there. How does the level of fear of a dangerous incident prevent people from living their lives? What occurs when someone is in a gang and must choose between school and making a living as a drug dealer? What specific pressures will he be under to make that choice? Can he do both? How do these types of structured criminal activities affect the school setting? How do the shootings and drug dealing effect the legitamate storefronts and business activity in the neighborhoods? These are some of the basic questions that O'Connor is talking about. You don't see very much in-depth reporting of any of this in the newspapers. There will just occasionally be a few lines from a few area residents or others that will make some general statements about how rough it is or something.
The reality is that the overwhelming majority of the newspaper readers (particularly those that the advertisers find most desirable) do not view what occurs in the inner-city as anything involving them. They don't feel it really is the same city so they are not particularly concerned with what occurs there. That's naive and unfortunate, obviously. For one thing, everybody in the city is paying for the police, ambulance, fire, hospital, and other services that have to be used in high crime areas. So, at the very least, it would make logical sense for people to be concerned whether their tax dollers are being used efffectively. Also, when people make it out of poverty they engage in more economic activity and bring in more tax revenue. And if inner-city neighborhoods improve there will be new businesses and better housing which will cause higher tax collections. So even for purely selfish reasons alone, all city residents should care about what occurs in high crime areas. But they don't. And that's why all the news organizations do not put very much reporting resources in the inner-city.
I agree with O'Connor.
And I think Chicago needs more of this:
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/feature/2009/10/19/chicago_fenger/print.html
Re: "I think we *do* know how much gunfire and mayhem are out there. EveryBlock is one of the best-known Web sites in the journalism community and presents that sort of data in an easily browsable format...[etc]"
'In the journalism community' may be the operative phrase there (and even w/in that context, not sure 'best-known' necessarily equates to 'best'). The vast majority of Chicagoans have never heard of it. Outside media circles, people aren't likely to go looking for that sort of data, undertaking mini-research projects, as part of their daily news routine.
Data is important, but it's no substitute for reporting. To cover serious problems facing a city with the depth and heft they deserve, someone needs to actually flesh out the human story. People aren't going to come to understand causes, how to address them, and why we should from copy-pasted reams of statistics or data tables.
