- Susy Schultz
The Community Media Workshop performs an exemplary media service: it connects Chicago reporters looking for stories to tell with neighborhood organizations whose stories need telling. Over its 25 years of playing this role, CMW has made itself a fixture in Chicago’s media ecology. But now it faces a threat to its existence: there are fewer mainstream-media reporters than there once were, and the ones who survive aren’t looking as hard at the neighborhoods. Thom Clark, president of CMW and one of its founders, remembers the time when you could call the reporters on the dailies’ urban affairs beat—reporters like the Tribune’s John McCarron—and pitch them stories from the hood “on housing development, job creation, new community arts centers, daycare center openings . . . ” But who do you call these days?
And the impoverished state of the mainstream media is just one gale-force wind in what Clark calls the “perfect storm” CMW has sailed into. The other is the economy that’s been blowing in all our faces since 2008. It’s battered the neighborhood NGOs that CMW serves, forcing them to cut back the programs CMW helps them promote, not to mention the fees they can afford to pay CMW for its workshops and other services. Over the years CMW has received about half its revenues from those fees, the other half from grants. And though Clark praises his major donors for their loyalty in tough times, he allows in his next breath that “donor fatigue” has diminished their generosity.
Schultz has done pretty much everything in her career as a journalist. She’s reported, edited, freelanced, taught at Medill and Columbia College, and in recent years acted as a readership consultant with the Small Newspaper Group, showing it how to shift its resources to the Web. She ran Chicago Parent magazine for four years. She handled public affairs for the Chicago region of the Department of Health and Human Services for two.
Like many another journalist with faith in newspapers, Schultz is inspired by Warren Buffett. Buffett’s bought up more than two dozen papers over the past couple of years and explained himself by saying this: “Newspapers continue to reign supreme in the delivery of local news. If you want to know what’s going on in your town—whether the news is about the mayor or taxes or high school football—there is no substitute for a local newspaper that is doing its job.”
