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Our blogger's identity is top secret, but you can call him Lou Grant. He's got the inside dish on doings at the Trib, Sun-Times and other Chicago media companies.

Whatever happened to...

By Lou Grant | Sep 02, 9:16 AM

Virginia Heffernan reports in the New York Times on a murder in her neighborhood and her search for news of the murder. It was a moment of déjà vu for me. Just last week, Jane Rickard was in the ChiTownDailyNews office at the same time I was, talking with Geoff Dougherty. Rickard is joining in the paper's coverage of the Blackhawks prospects and the Chicago Wolves in the hockey blog.

On this day, however, she was trying to get some coverage of a murder in North Center. Rickard was pushing for someone else to take an interest in the case, the murder on Sunday August 24^th of Robert Ferris. Ferris, who lived above June's Bar in the 4300 block of north Western Avenue, was found dead of a shotgun blast on Sunday morning after he failed to report to the business he ran, Ferris Shell.

The coverage by the mainstream media described a saint of a man. Sure, saints are often gunned down in their backyards, right?

Heffernan says, "I wanted to find out more, and I saw only two ways to do that. I could fake-casually walk north five blocks and chat up the police behind the barricade. Or I could turn to the World Wide Web." Turning to the WWW, I found two articles each by the Chicago Sun-Times and the Chicago Tribune and two video reports, one by CLTV and the other by WLS-Channel 7. I've basically summarized what they said above.

There hasn't been any citizen journalism interest in Ferris' death. Heffernan found several reports in five competing CJ sites in her Brooklyn neighborhood, including one in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. She says, "I wanted the hometown Eagle to take hold of the story, to claim authority and set us straight. But it demurred."

Neighborhood news, the new hyper local, is of immediate concern. I'm talking as much to my neighbors about a break-in three doors west as I am about the choice of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin to be John McCain's running mate. And Heffernan makes this clear too, "I shouldn't be reading about this, I thought. But I also wondered where the man's children went to school and where his wife might work… Sometimes over coffee, The Eagle is salvation: first thing in the morning, it can be hard to care about other people's neighborhoods."

The problem of citizen journalism is that, there may be 40 or even 400 writers out there, but often they aren't trained to ask the right questions. Geoff Dougherty has done a great job coaching us along, having us ask the right questions of the right people. It's led to some original reporting and some nods from people we are focusing on, such as the series on the Chicago Housing Authority. Heffernan discusses her own illusions about CJ in the article saying, "for every event in every town, let a thousand online stories - and a million gonzo comments - bloom. But I had lost my illusions. I guess when I mistily imagine citizen journalism, I picture a raucous and ungrammatical but righteously crusading and frank affair, and I can't face that it's sometimes a desktop effort to ape tabloids, with bloody photos, insinuating headlines and none of the rigid protocols actually used by tabloids."

Even with those 40 or even 400 writers, there are days when it is hard to find fresh copy. For example, many of us took off over the long Labor Day weekend. Tuesday morning is likely to have a lot of Friday's copy still up.

Heffernan then discusses the same frustration that hit Rickard, "what frustrated me here is that few journalists - citizen or pro - seemed to have done much, if any, reporting, even though there was a surfeit of interest. Everyone seemed to cite someone else, and no one with much conviction." To be fair, the MSM did its own original reporting. But it didn't ask why someone would want to kill such a sainted person.

The story got me thinking about June's. I remember a juicy June's story from recent years: A man named Alan Wyman was accused of sequestering himself in June's with a Jameson's "no ice." Meanwhile, inside his apartment, a woman he had kidnapped and raped was hidden in a sound-proof closet.

The story led some women's activists to accuse the Chicago Sun-Times of sensationalizing the story. Wyman was romanticized, they said. The story should have concentrated on the viewpoint of the terrorized woman.

I searched for Alan Wyman and found one blog entry that dated from November 2006.

Now I'm interested not only in the murder of Robert Ferris but I'm also wondering about Alan Wyman. What happened to his court case? Like many of you and many journalists, professional and citizen, I went to the web and found it unsatisfying. We, as citizen journalists need to follow up on stories through the courts, truly making the stories our own with original reporting. Hyper-local will not work without follow-through.

Tagged: citizen journalism

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Media Insider

Our blogger's identity is top secret, but you can call him Lou Grant. He's got the inside dish on doings at the Trib, Sun-Times and other Chicago media companies.

Whatever happened to...

By Lou Grant | Sep 02, 9:16 AM

Discuss

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