After the editor’s note was posted to the website, after the announcements on Facebook and Twitter, after the letters were sent to subscribers, Susan Smith Richardson received a phone call. Richardson, the editor and publisher of The Chicago Reporter, had received several phone calls since announcing on September 4 that the Reporter, which has covered the intersection of race, policy, and economic inequality in Chicago since 1972, would be going online only, but she had been expecting one like this. I’m sorry it’s going away, the caller, an eighty-someyear-old Reporter subscriber from South Shore, told Richardson, because I’m not online. The caller told Richardson that she was once a community activist herself, devoted to the issues the Reporter covers. Richardson used a lot of adjectives to describe the conversation: “lovely,” “long,” “pleasant,” “meaningful”—in all, “one of the most important phone calls I got after going digital,” she said. It was also the only such conversation she had—so far, the woman from South Shore has been the only person to call to express disappointment with the decision. Richardson had been expecting a flood of
calls like this, but it never came. In a digital era when leaving the print medium may still be interpreted as surrender, the support for discontinuing its print publication has been vindicating for the Reporter. Richardson has seen the bold move confirmed as the right decision. Ever since civil rights activist John McDermott founded a slim newsletter called The Chicago Reporter in 1972, it has been unique. No other news organization—then or now—focuses solely on investigating race, poverty, and economic inequality in a specific city. (Tom Brune, a former Reporter managing editor who is now working on a master’s thesis on its history, says he has yet to find “anything quite like it.”) The Reporter has been alarmingly consistent in this respect, to the point that past Reporter stories, whether about gentrification in Lincoln Park or racial diversity in enrollment and faculty at Chicago-area universities, feel like they could have been published in the last couple of years rather than deacdes ago. Its investigations have consistently IMAGES COURTESY OF THE CHICAGO REPORTER, COLLAGE BY ELLIE MEJIA won awards and influenced policy: among the standouts are a 1978 story about discrepancies between park facilities in white, black, and Latino wards that spurred a threeyear investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice, and a 2000s series on mortgage Continued on page 4