Some things never change. I came to Chicago in 1979 to take a job at the Chicago Tribune. One day early in my tenure, an editor asked me if I knew anything about municipal finance. My uncle Bob once told me: “Never admit you don’t know how to do something. And I had written a few business stories. So I said something like: Sure, bonds, stocks, no sweat. The next thing I knew he tossed a short wire service report on my desk about the Chicago Public School District being unable to sell some Tax Anticipation Notes and said, Okay, then find out what’s happening with this. Yikes!
My Dad was an electrician and my mom a precinct captain. Over dinner we usually talked about the parish priest or St. Louis Cardinals slugger Stan Musial. Municipal finance was something for Republicans. By that time, though, I had learned enough reporting in places like court houses to run over to LaSalle Street and ask a bond dealer for the note issues prospectus, a lethal looking document that a source once told me was supposed to disclose any problems with stock and bond sales. I found the document, and sure enough, buried in its turgid prose simmered the beginnings of a great story: The school district couldn’t sell its notes because it was going broke. Not many reporters knew much about finance in the newsroom of that era and pretty soon crusty old city room vets started calling me Nickel and Dime.
But I wrote some blockbuster stories that created calls for reform of the school system. And that, these many years later, is what the Chicago New Cooperative’s Crystal Yednak is writing about in Friday’s Chicago pages of the New York Times. A crackerjack reporter, Crystal isn t dealing with financial reform; she’s writing about Marshall High School, which is broke in another way. Only four percent — that’s right FOUR percent — of its students passed the state achievement exam. The West Side school is one of several targeted as a turnaround school in an intervention program touted by the Obama administration. A veteran education reporter who enjoys digging through official documents, Crystal represents the kind of journalist that the CNC embraces. How could a school have only four percent of its students pass the test? Read her story and you’ll find out.
City Hall reporter Dan Milhalopoulos is at it again, too, with an item about Mayor Daley. Last week, Dan broke a story about City Hall math, namely how big a pay cut elected officials suffered if they took unpaid furlough days to help plug a hole in the city’s budget. This is Chicago, of course, a city where politicians get confused by numbers and, maybe, read the numeral 1 as 10 when doing something like, oh, counting votes. So it shouldn’t come as a surprise to learn that percentage calculations of pay cuts for elected officials turned out to be lower than that suffered by snow plow drivers. Upon learning about Dan’s story, the Mayor decided to make some changes in his pay calculations, and the results could surprise you.
CNC columnist Jim Warren escaped the snowplows this week for a little sun down south, but he left some storm clouds back here with a column about the dismal turnout in last week’s primary election. And Sports columnist Dan McGrath filed an item about Craig Robinson, the First Brother-In-Law in the Obama household, and a coaching job at DePaul.
CNC has added a new writer to its stable of talent, Daniel Libit, who came to Chicago from Politico in Washington D.C. Daniel got here just in time for two storms, one involving snow and the other politics. Illinois, he reports, has the distinction of being the only place in America where a one-time Democratic candidate for lieutenant governor could embarrass pawnbrokers.
The Chicago News Cooperative produces two pages of Chicago News twice a week on Friday and Sunday for the New York Times. We report, we don’t just repeat. We also want to hear from readers. If you know of a story you think deserves our attention, drop us a line. You never know, we just might write it. As my uncle Bob used to say, if someone asks you if you can do something, always say, Yes, even if you think you can’t, and you’ll be surprised what can happen.