Community Media Workshop
2009 Studs Terkel Award Winner David Jackson, Chicago Tribune
David Jackson got his first reporting internship at Chicago magazine in the 1980s when it was housed at WFMT. One of the first people he met was Studs Terkel, who David recalls “introduced himself by coming by where I worked and saying, ‘I want to meet some young people. Can you help me?’”
Driving him around to nightclubs, David recalls a larger-than-life image of Studs, somewhat fragile even then, in a trenchcoat, his valise-sized reel-to-reel recorder slung over one shoulder and with an “outlandishly giant” microphone to match.
“It was the most amazing kind of journalistic theater I’ve ever seen,” David recalls.
Growing up in Hyde Park—his father was a U of C professor—Studs’ books “left their mark deep inside me, way before I knew what I was interested in doing,” David says. The Workshop’s own Curtis Black prompted David to interview some local jazz musicians for the underground Haymarket Review, which led David to Chicago. He later became a regular reporter and editor there—covering stories such as the city’s biggest and most notorious slumlord in recent history, Lew Wolf, for example, before going to the Chicago Tribune. Except for a year at the Washington Post in the 1990s (he didn’t like D.C.), he’s worked at the Tribune most of his career.
This year David is at Harvard on a Nieman fellowship, researching elementary school students in big, urban school systems who are consistently absent, suspended, or truant. He’s approaching the material more as a researcher rather than a reporter to facilitate access to confidential data sets about the little-studied group—trying, albeit in a different arena than news, to understand what’s actually happening on the ground. His favorite of all his stories? Perhaps his recent work on mortgage fraud and the tie to foreclosures, or maybe a piece about a 1993 murder just north of Pullman. The latter goes beyond the facts to allow the shooter, a sympathetic older man seeking to keep order on lawless streets, to explain how it happened, while keeping the focus on the victim, 14-year-old James Williams—one of “the nice ones,” as the headline ran.
“It shows the way that journalism, if it really minutely examines the world, can end up being productive,” David says—part of his practice of what he calls “social justice, public-service reporting.”
David, who is 50, lives in Wicker Park.
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