Entries associated with the tag "Chicago Reader":

The debate is raging over this week's notorious New Yorker cover of Barack and Michelle Obama, but here in Chicago we've been there, done that. There's a world of difference between Barry Blitt's drawing of the up-and-comers in Islamic and revolutionary regalia and Mirth and Girth, David K. Nelson's 1988 acrylic painting of Harold Washington in a woman's undergarments: Blitt's trying to ridicule Barack Obama's more rabid opponents, while Nelson was trying to knock the recently deceased mayor's more rabid glorifiers. 

But their works have this much in common. They've made people furious. And each works better as an idea than as an executed picture. As Clarence Page said in the Tribune Wednesday about Blitt's cover -- "When it takes you too long to figure out whether a joke is funny, well, forget about it." I've never been able to persuade myself that Nelson's painting wasn't dumb (I've tried), and I'm still looking for ways to decide that Blitt's is witty.

The David K. Nelson controversy was a major chapter in our city's hysteria-packed history, an episode that began with black aldermen under police escort commandeering a painting from the School of the Art Institute and ended six years later with a withering decision in U.S. Appellate Court and an out-of-court settlement to Nelson. In his 1994 opinion Judge Richard Posner noted that after a day in police custody the painting was released to Nelson, "we assume on its own recognizance."

Mirth and Girth wasn't the last time David K. Nelson stirred up trouble in Chicago. In 1991 he made a cartoon for the Reader's year-in-review issue that was pretty funny. It showed Alderman Dorothy Tillman as a paper doll in skivvies trying to decide what to wear, a "feminine yet subtly persuasive" outfit accessorized by a revolver or something a little more rugged accessorized by a submachine gun and matching ammo-clip bandolier. (Tillman had reportedly waved a gun at a community meeting.) "Help Dress Dorothy," we called the cartoon.

To make a long story short, here's the column I wrote three weeks later, after the chairman of the state Democratic Party had urged his party's candidates not to advertise in this newspaper. And here's my column the week after that, meditating on the demonstration against the Reader that I'd watched from an office window.

The comments on the Reader's Clout City blog can get pretty rambunctious. Two months ago, James Sachay, former assistant commissioner of Chicago's Department of Aviation, named the Reader as codefendant in a defamation suit because of one of them. The comment, dated January 31 and "signed" by Sachay, said in part:

"I am voting for Frank Coconate. I am sorry I challenged his petitions under false pretenses. I am sorry I stole money from Roman Pucinski. I am sorry I got illegal contracts for my son and acted criminally at O'Hare."

Coconate was fired by the city two years ago from his job as a sewer safety worker. This past winter he donned the mantle of gadfly reformer taking on the machine and ran a failed race for Democratic committeeman in the 41st Ward. Sachay alleged in his suit that Coconate was the actual author of the blog post, though Coconate denies it; the Reader's supposed offense was allowing it to appear. 

But the Reader argued in its motion to dismiss that it enjoys immunity under Section 230 of the federal Communications Decency Act, which draws a distinction between a publisher that selects what to publish and the proprietor of a public Web forum. This distinction holds even if the Web site provider makes some effort to police the site. (Someone here took down the offending comment sometime after it appeared.)

On June 3 the Reader was dismissed as a defendant in response to a new motion filed by Sachay. His amended suit against only Coconate will continue.

For more on Web forums and the law, check out my column on the tempest that followed a Tribune profile of violinist Rarchel Barton Pine.

The Reader's Mick Dumke was hailed last Saturday night in Beverly Hills. At a banquet attended by many of LA's most glittering swells, who gathered to enjoy a "gourmet vegan" meal and celebrate the rights of animals, he received a Genesis Award from the Humane Society of the United States. Each year the society honors journalists for work that focuses on animal issues; Dumke was cited for best newspaper magazine feature for a piece he freelanced to the Tribune Magazine before coming on staff here, "Ruffling Feathers: Once Viewed as Crazies, Animal Rights Activists Say Their Message Is Starting to Get Through," which presented a "new perspective on the animal rights movement, acknowledging the mainstream acceptance of the issues the movement espouses." Here's a link to a summary of his winning article -- unless you're a subscriber you'll have to pay to read the whole thing.

The new leaner, meaner, more melancholy Reader has come in for a little sympathy from New York Times media writer David Carr. A former editor of the Reader's sister paper in Washington, D.C., the Washington City Paper, Carr's Monday column tells the story of the Reader's devastating layoffs last week (City Paper took the same kind of beating) by focusing on John Conroy, one of the four writers dismissed here. Last week, after the city of Chicago reached settlement agreements with four men who had accused its police officers of torturing them, Conroy received a note that may have given him some consolation. It said:

“My son, Aaron Patterson, tortured by the Chicago Police Department, would not be alive today, I believe, without your articles about police torture in the City of Chicago. You documented and wrote the realization of police torture, of which we will never forget. You help save my son’s life for which I thank you.”

Letters like that don't pay the doctor's bills, but they make it easier for an out-of-work investigative reporter to manage a decent night's sleep. Under journalism's new business model, Carr broods, "the newsroom is no longer the core purpose of media, it’s just overhead," and he observes, "Thousands of bloggers could type for a millennium and not come up with the kind of deeply reported story that freed innocent men."

The other three writers that the Reader let go last week are Tori Marlan, Steve Bogira, and Harold Henderson, whom the Reader billed as "the world's first blogger" and who will continue blogging offsite. Given the circumstances, Harold has done something remarkably gracious: on his new blog he's posted a link to the Web site of Reader contributor Lee Sandlin, and urged his readers to go there and read Sandlin's tribute to this paper's "currently embattled editor." That's Alison True, who under a cost-slashing mandate from the new owners, Creative Loafing of Tampa, Florida, executed last week's massacre. She's taking a beating for that -- but read what Sandlin has to say.

I found myself sharing a table with Dawn Clark Netsch at a dinner last week and she said she'd noticed changes in the Reader. Was the paper OK? "We've got a story on page one by John Conroy," I said, and that was answer enough. A week later I'd have had to say no. John -- and Tori Marlan, Harold Henderson, and Steve Bogira -- were no longer with the Reader.

Laying off these staff writers, which editor Alison True did at the beginning of this week, was surely one of the hardest acts of her life and certainly a low point in the history of this newspaper. "Over the years," True said Thursday in a message to the staff, " John, Harold, Tori, and Steve have produced some of our most important and exciting stories. Their achievements have included brilliant investigative work, prestigious awards, and possibly most important, spurring social change in a city that always needs it. . . . I can't emphasize enough that this action in no way reflects a judgment on the value of the work of these particular writers, and in fact it's my fervent hope that they'll continue to work with us on a contractual basis."

They're gone because the Reader couldn't afford to go on paying them their salaries -- "As you might guess, this move represents a shift in the financial structure of our relationship with contributors," True wrote.

They're gone because a few years ago Craigslist moved in on our classifieds section -- and classifieds represented a huge portion of our income. They're gone because the old Section One -- the editorial section -- was for decades the tail that wagged the dog here, and when revenues fell it became impossible to continue to allocate the same funds to it.

I called the boss, Ben Eason, in Tampa and reminded him that the last time we'd talked he was saying John Conroy deserved a Pulitzer Prize. (That's a popular idea around here. He's been writing about police torture since 1990, but there's no Pulitzer for persistence, no matter how important the subject.) The first time Eason and I talked, just after Eason had bought the paper this summer, I said that Conroy was, in effect, the canary in the coal mine -- as long as he was OK readers would know the Reader was OK. 

"I know, I know," said Eason, who was informed of True's intentions before she made her move. "All I've done is, I've said this is what the budget number is. This is what we’ve got to have. And it’s the same number that’s been out there since August."

Eason and Creative Loafing have some interesting, and let's hope brilliant, ideas about the future of the Reader and the CL chain of six newspapers. "It's ultimately to me a navigation problem," Eason told me. "How do you keep putting out a newspaper at a quality people expect and how do you migrate this stuff to the Web, which is ultimately the future? We’re in a fight over who can tell you more about the street corner in Chicago. You've got a mobile phone and you're hungry or you want to rent an apartment and you're consulting your cell phone, and its going to be Google or Yahoo and they’re getting their information from somebody. Those guys" -- Yahoo, Google -- "they’re not even pretending to be journalists," said Eason.  But "we're the journalism right behind them, the stories and information that's still the most comprehensive and best stuff out there. But the challenge is make that turn. I guess I felt that if I was doing fundamental damage to the Reader I wouldn't have bought the Reader."

While writing for the Reader, Conroy's published acclaimed books on Northern Ireland and torture. Bogira, who's been on leave working on a book, published a terrific book on Chicago's criminal courts, Courtroom 302, that HBO is planning to turn into a miniseries. Our last cover story by Marlan, who recently completed a Patterson Fellowship, concerned a Yemeni student who's still being held prisoner in Guantanamo two years after he was recommended for release. Henderson blogged for us, tossed off features on just about anything, and had the most eclectic mind at the paper. Does their departure do fundamental damage to the Reader? 

I want to say no, because the remaining staff is top drawer. But I expect readers to mourn the departed. Newspapers haven't come to the point where no one will notice.

It's good to see the Tribune catching up -- on page one, no less -- to last year's Reader story about Congressman Jerry Weller and his mysterious land holdings in Nicaragua.

The Reader and Frank Smyth are happy to have shown them the way, but the timing of the Tribune story could have been better -- 10 months after the last congressional elections, 14 months before the next ones, and well after Weller lost his inappropriate leadership position on the House Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere. Our story appeared a week or two before Weller faced reelection, and the Tribune's silence at the time made it easier for Weller to ride us out. "Half of it is sex ads, so it's not exactly a Grade A newspaper," Weller's campaign manager said then about the Reader. "You have to consider the source in this, and the timing."

But give the Tribune credit: it didn't endorse Weller last year. Ignoring his land interests but finding his marriage to a "daughter of a former Guatemalan dictator who has been accused of war crimes" conflict of interest enough, the paper sat out the race.

What’s the future of section one of the Reader—with its movie reviews and TIF exposés and relentless 17-years-and-counting coverage of torture in the Chicago Police Department? Certainly editorial content wasn’t anything the Reader’s new CEO, Ben Eason, dwelled on at the staff meeting Wednesday, where his focus was on Web opportunities, regaining ground lost to Craigslist in classified advertising, and the efficiencies of centralizing the design work in Atlanta--a change that is likely to cost a dozen or so Reader employees their jobs.

So afterward I asked him about editorial. “It’s everything,” he said. He talked to me about the “convening power” of a newspaper, about stories that attract “movers and shakers” even if they don’t interest the multitudes. And about the autonomy of the editor, who will remain Alison True. I’ve looked at a couple of Creative Loafing papers from other cities; to my eye their design is garish and homely, and it doesn’t respect the stories it ought to serve. If the centralized design staff makes this the look of the Reader--which will be turned into a one-section tabloid by Creative Loafing, though the old owners were planning to do the same--I think readers will judge it as antithetical to what they’ve understood the Reader to be.

We’ll see. The Reader has been visited by one of the most common but dispiriting traumas of the newspaper business--new out-of-town ownership. A newspaper, I think I read somewhere, is supposed to be a community talking to itself, and owners from a thousand miles away make an intrusive addition to the conversation. The paper I grew up with in Saint Louis is no longer locally owned, the paper I cut my teeth on, the Sun-Times, was sold by Marshall Field to Rupert Murdoch almost a quarter century ago, and now the paper I’ve worked for ever since has joined the procession. Even if  the public doesn’t care one way or another about all this imperialism, journalists do--and I wonder now why anyone at the Tribune Company thought for a second that the LA Times would reconcile itself to being controlled by Chicago.

The staffs of the Chicago Reader and its sister Washington City Paper just found out the papers have been sold to a southern chain, Creative Loafing Inc., which publishes alternative weeklies in Atlanta, Tampa, Sarasota, and Charlotte. The news is shocking but oddly unsurprising--these are hard times for newspapers everywhere, and in consolidation lie the theoretical advantages of scale and fresh energy.

"We never thought it would come to pass. We’ve received so many overtures over the years and they’ve never come to pass,” Bob Roth, a founder of the Reader in 1971 and president of Chicago Reader, Inc., told me. But when Creative Loafing made its overture in March, “we got a better offer than I expected. And I guess it was time. We’ve been here for 36 years.” Roth, who turned 60 this spring, said all ten people with an ownership stake in the company supported a sale. “I’m looking forward to a younger, energetic management,” he said. “Maybe it’ll be an improvement over us guys.”

If times were better, I asked him, and the Reader were still making money hand over fist, do you think you'd all be so ready to call it quits. Roth thought about that awhile. “Yes, I do. But I think that’s because we’re ready to retire,” he said at last.

“We have built our Creative Loafing brand by offering valuable content to people who influence public opinion and public tastes in culturally vibrant markets,” says Creative Loafing’s CEO, Ben Eason, in a prepared statement heavier on jargon than I wish it were. “The addition of two top-ten markets--and two of the industry’s most respected alternative news products--offers us a pivotal gateway of connectivity with the young adult audience.” He went on, “While others may be looking at publishing companies through the lens of old print media, we are pioneering the opportunities offered by convergent print, web, and new media applications.”

Mike Crystal will stay on as publisher of the Reader, and Alison True as editor--that’s good news. I’m told Creative Loafing, which began in 1972 as an Atlanta paper founded by Eason's parents, doesn’t meddle particularly in the local operations of its papers, which publish the kind of serious journalism the Reader is known for--though not as much of it. How the Reader will change, and how much it will change, are questions that preoccupy everyone concerned at the moment.

Addendum: Read the press releases from the Reader and Creative Loafing.

Newspapers under pressure to save a buck or two often turn their scythes against their copy editors, trimming those ranks in the forlorn hope that “well, maybe no one will notice.” Readers do notice: the fact that isn’t factual, the sentence that makes no sense, the paragraph that loses its way, the piece that doesn't know how to get to its point or when to end. Over the years I've received dozens of phone calls and emails siccing me on writers for publishing the sort of mistakes that good editors are supposed to catch, mistakes that careless editors sometimes introduce.

Unlike those abused writers, I have no excuse. My copy has been edited for years by senior editor Kitry Krause, whose belief in language as a precision tool exceeds my own. The act of writing blinds the writer; her job was to make me see. Some weeks this meant my seeing that my column had no point, other weeks that the point hadn't been thought through, and occasionally that the point was so insipid or offensive it would risk my reputation. I never learned how to enjoy these moments of revelation. But sulkiness comes and goes; gratitude is forever. Kitry just left the Reader, which, I hasten to add, promptly replaced her. A word to the writers at the Atlantic Monthly whom my friend will soon be editing: if I threw a big enough fit she'd let me squirm under the bar; it was, after all, my story and my name on it. But she would not lower the bar.

Tony Lagouranis, the former army interrogator who's the subject of John Conroy's cover story in the March 2 Reader, has a name that might ring a bell. Lagouranis is spreading the message that while working for the army in Iraq he tortured detainees, and to no useful end, and among his public appearances is the one in a recent New Yorker article on the TV show 24 . Lagouranis was part of a delegation led by the dean of the U.S. Military Academy that met last November with the show's creative team to protest its free and easy use of torture. "In Iraq," Lagouranis tells the magazine, "I never saw pain produce intelligence." 24's having a rocky year. I watch it faithfully as a guilty pleasure, but pleasure is more evanescent than guilt and the show everybody celebrated last season now seems to have a lot of people feeling queasy.

Consider this discussion of the show's troubling "political theology." I can't be that lofty. 24 is television, so I'll compare it to another show: Medium, whose hero has the knack of being able to solve crimes in her sleep. Toward the end of the one episode I've seen -- my brother-in-law played the murder victim -- the show wasn't anywhere close to tying up its loose ends and there were only a couple minutes to go till the credits. So the writers sent the hero back to bed. In her dream all was revealed. It was the silliest thing my wife and I had ever seen. Yet in 24 torture functions in the same way. The show pretends to be complicated, but it's got a mass audience it can't afford to confuse, so it's really just The Perils of Pauline (or Jack Bauer) gussied up with outlandish plot twists. Any suspense is over whether the writers will paint themselves into a corner they can't get out of. And since the present peril has to be resolved by the end of the hour so the show can get on to the next one, plot expedients are necessary and torture's the favorite.

Torture moves things along. Besides, it doesn't really hurt. Have we all forgotten the terrible things that the Arab extremists did to Jack within an hour after he got off the plane from China already a wreck? To quote no less an authority than the official 24 Web site: "Fayed pierces the bundle of nerves on Jack's shoulder with a knife." And then, "Fayed stabs Jack in the back with something sharp, causing Jack to keel over." Bauer got out of that one and I don't think he slowed down long enough to dab those pierced nerves with Mercurochrome. But 24 is a show where even death is reversible. At least Jack's was (season two). Lagouranis says in the New Yorker that interrogators he knew in Iraq watched 24 to pick up tips on how to make prisoners come clean. That's scary -- the business end of our intelligence pipeline consists of guys who watch Kiefer Sutherland earn his half million dollars an episode and think they're all in the same line of work.

What could Dr. Robert Simon, the chief of Stroger Hospital, possibly have told the Reader 12 years ago that would have led to a Sun-Times reporter getting cuffed at the hospital on Thursday?

Here's the full Reader story, written when Simon ran the old County Hospital's department of emergency medicine.

Here's the money quote: "I did not come here to help the bum on the street -- the alcoholic or drug addict who comes to the ER 40 times a year just to get a place to sleep. I didn't come here for 'the homeless,' because I've worked for 18 years in emergency medicine -- I know what 'the homeless' really are. I'm not a liberal. Die-hard liberals talk about 'the homeless.' If they actually saw what they're defending I don't think they'd be so die-hard. Most of the homeless really don't care about themselves or are psychiatrically impaired. You can give them any opportunity in the world, and they would not take advantage of it. They could do things for themselves, but they won't. So who the hell cares about them?"

And here's the backstory. which the Sun-Times barely mentioned because it decided to focus instead on reporter Steve Patterson's arrest and the dubious history of the Stroger Hospital police force. Ed Shurna, director of the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless, says anger over budget cuts ordered at Stroger hasn't been limited to poor people who use the hospital. Doctors have called him to share their anguish, says Shurna, and they've told him they dug up the old Reader interview and confronted Simon with it. Shurna says Simon said now you know where I'm coming from. (On Thursday Simon told WMAQ's Carol Marin he was misquoted in the Reader story.)

Thursday's rally by Shurna's organization was about both the cuts and Simon's supposedly heartless approach to his job -- though the Reader interview, conducted by reporter Sarah Bryan Miller, portrays a complex, driven, arrogant idealist who believes ardently in some sort of universal health coverage. Miller, by the way, is now the classical music critic at the Saint Louis Post-Dispatch. And the Reader stands by her story. 

The Tribune and Sun-Times reported Thursday that convicted murderer Darrell Cannon wants to add Mayor Richard Daley and former mayor Jane Byrne to his federal lawsuit, which alleges that his confession was extracted by torture. When Cannon was convicted, 1984, Byrne was mayor and Daley was state's attorney, and Commander Jon Burge--who would be thrown off the police force amid allegations of torture in 1993--was still running Area Two, where the detectives who arrested Cannon worked. The murder conviction was vacated in 1997, but Cannon remains in prison for violating parole in connection with a 1971 murder. Of all the cases involving Burge's accusers, Cannon's is one of the most complicated and important. You'll find the full story in our archive of work by Reader staff writer John Conroy, who's been writing about Burge since 1990.

UPDATE: As is pointed out in this item's comments section, Jane Byrne was no longer mayor when Cannon was convicted in 1984, nor was she mayor at the time of the 1983 murder he was convicted of. Attorney Flint Taylor tells me he wants to add Byrne to the lawsuit on the grounds that while mayor, from 1979 to 1983, she encouraged the kind of aggressive police tactics that spawned torture and did not respond to information she received from her police superintendent that it might be taking place.

Last week Dorothy Brown, clerk of the Cook County Circuit Court and a candidate for mayor of Chicago. wrote a letter to U.S. attorney Patrick Fitzgerald expressing concern that the local courts have been involved in a "massive cover-up" of police torture by former commander Jon Burge and some of his detectives. "The latest article in the Chicago Reader, by reporter John Conroy, couldn't make the case more clear," she told Fitzgerald, and asked him to investigate. On Friday morning, December 8, she held a news conference at the Federal Center to discuss her letter and the alleged cover-up.

Here at the Reader we wondered if the coverage would mention Conroy and our paper. We were asking the wrong question. The right question was: Would the coverage mention Brown? Would there even be coverage?

In a day when the media were preoccupied with the killings at the Ogilvie Center, Brown pretty much struck out.

Her spokesman, John Davis, says the news conference drew a big crowd but nobody reported on it. The Tribune ignored the subject she raised until Monday, when it published a long article reporting that Mayor Daley was about to announce his own candidacy. Deep in that article was this paragraph: "Police brutality and other wrongdoing by officers, as well as the alleged torture of suspects by former Cmdr. Jon Burge, is another campaign issue being pressed by the challengers."

The Sun-Times included in its own Monday article on Daley a chat with Jacky Grimshaw, who ran intergovernmental affairs under Mayor Harold Washington. Grimshaw said the mayor's challengers lack "gravitas," and Brown "seems to be running an invisible campaign."