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2008 Studs Terkel Media Award Winner, Tom McNamee
 Tom McNamee is not one of those journalists who knew what he was going to do from the time he was a child. Instead, the idea came as "a mini- epiphany" when he was a year into college. It was a perfect summer night on North Michigan Avenue--June 27, 1973 to be exact--and a homeless man curled against the gold revolving doors of the Wrigley Building made a stark contrast to the tourists and other dressed-up strollers around them. "I told Barb, 'if I were a newspaper reporter, I could walk up to that guy and find out what I want to know anyway--why are you here, what happened to you?'" McNamee recalls. He transferred to Northern Illinois University to study journalism the following fall.
After school Tom went on to the defunct Suburban Tribune (where he won his first journalism award for covering nepotism and corruption in Chicago Heights), then enrolled at the University of Chicago's Social Service Administration school, even though he knew he wanted to stay in the news business: "I told them, 'I have no interest in being a social worker at all, but I am interested in social welfare--poverty and people who have no power.'"
After getting his master's Tom became an intern at the Sun-Times, where he's been ever since. In early February he was appointed editorial board editor. Prior to that he had been penning his Monday column "The Chicago Way" for the Sun-Times for three years, and writing stories for and about Chicagoans for more than two decades.
More often than not, those stories have been about race--a natural for someone who grew up on the South Side in the 1960s and 1970s, when everyone knew exactly where the "color line" that divided white from black neighborhoods was located, and who recalls going to the last all-white public high school in the city. His parents' refusal to tolerate bigotry in their kids kept him open-minded, he recalls.
Writing about race connects him to Studs Terkel--whom Tom calls an inspiration because "Studs is fascinated by every human being walking down the block." Tom is proud to have uncovered a story that Studs later used in one of his books, about a white family's take on racial change in Gage Park--that showed the complexity of how almost-overnight neighborhood change in the 1970s hurt Chicagoans on both sides of the color line.
He draws his sense of what makes good newspaper reading in part from his own study of some of Chicago's most famous columnists going back to George Ade, who got average people's stories at the 1893 World's Fair for the Chicago Record, and Ben Hecht, a Chicago reporter of the early 20th century whose career became the model for the movie The Front Page.
And, he draws from the same impulse that drew him toward journalism in the first place, that evening on Michigan Avenue: "be a reporter first," he says. "Talk to real people in person…. Readers want a newspaper to take them places, [so] they can feel it, so they can have a sense of walking the streets."
One columnist he tries to keep from influencing his writing is Mike Royko. It helps, Tom says, that he's not mean (he says it with a little regret: "being mean sells papers," he notes). Other than "being nice," he says, two things distinguish The Chicago Way, Tom says: he leaves the newsroom to do it, and it's about average Chicagoans who might otherwise never find their way into the paper.
"I think stories are how we define ourselves," he says. "Inside every adult is a small child saying, 'tell me a story, please.'" Tom lives with his wife, Debbie, and three children in Skokie.
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