- Via Google Plus
- Mark Konkol
Bill Mullen, a retired Tribune reporter, remembers that when he broke in back in the 1960s, discussions in Chicago’s newsrooms would go like this:
The Anne Keegan Award was created three years ago to honor the kind of journalism the late Tribune columnist and feature writer specialized in—observant, compassionate stories about people you probably had never heard of, “the little guy.” The DNAinfo stories fit the bill. The site’s reporters hit the bricks, talking to parents and sweethearts and BFFs, and introduced to Chicago the victims of the city’s endless parade of homicides—most of them “blue” crimes that in another era wouldn’t have been reported.
The screen cuts to a DNAinfo reporter behind the wheel, driving into a ‘hood. “Reporter Erica Demarest’s job is to put a human face on murder victims who otherwise might just be a statistic in Chicago’s running tally of homicides,” Konkol narrates. And then we hear from Demarest: “One of the main things I do is this project called ‘The Human Toll’ where we profile every single murder victim in the city,” she says. ‘Usually, when a little girl gets killed, or a straight A student, that gets a lot of coverage, and everyone else gets ignored. At DNA we cover everyone.”
