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2009 Terkel Award Winner Alden Loury
 For Alden Loury the road to editor and publisher of The Chicago Reporter started when he was in seventh grade in front of the TV with the sound down and the game on so he could practice calling the plays.
About halfway through an extended college career at University of Illinois at Champaign/Urbana (“I was still growing up but hadn’t found anything that inspired me to get my act together,” he recalls), Alden, 39, got a job as a bank teller and for extra money took a night job at the Champaign News Gazette recording phoned-in results from local games. He wrote an anonymous paragraph or two. “It was grunt work for the sports department, but I loved it,” he says.
He re-enrolled at Parkland College, studying mass communications and even calling local ball games for the school’s radio station, fulfilling that childhood dream. But the more he learned, the more he wanted to do public affairs reporting “writing about real stuff, stuff that mattered,” he says. He took his journalism studies and radio work further, and while finishing up at U of I with a degree in journalism in 1997 returned to the News Gazette to take a local reporting job.
Over the next couple years he covered the city’s black community alongside other local issues. He found one of his best stories when he learned vendors of goods and services to city government were blatantly ignoring the Human Relations Commission’s efforts to get them to comply with affirmative-action laws. Among the offenders? His own paper.
“I had to have a conversation with the editor in chief” when the time came to publish the embarrassing story, Alden says, but the paper ran with it. “They were kind of like, ‘this doesn’t look good for us, but you have to respect the work that was done.’” Later that year he saw an ad for a position at The Chicago Reporter and applied.
“I can’t tell you how incredibly fun, exciting, and rewarding the last nine years have been, because every story has been like that story [about affirmative action in Champaign],” he says. “Every day we’ve got pieces [like his News Gazette story] in the works.”
Since joining the magazine, an arm of nonprofit Community Renewal Society that investigates how race and poverty impact social issues, Alden has covered disparities in the sentences of convicted whites and people of color (reported and written on a Crime and Communities Media Fellowship from the Open Society Institute) and has led more than 50 investigative projects. Alden has been honored with Lisagor awards from the Chicago Headline Club and the Bar Association’s Herman Kogan award, among others.
Alden and his wife Adrienne live in Auburn Gresham with their 2 daughters; his first daughter lives with her mom in Hyde Park.
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