By Michael Miner
“We are in receipt of the calendar you sent our staff member Terry Brown on behalf of the Chicago Reader. All editorial employees are governed by an ethics policy that precludes them from accepting any gifts. Therefore, we have donated the calendar to a charitable organization.
“The intention of the policy is good. The execution is a little silly at times, don’t you think?” said Brown, the Tribune’s bureau chief for the western suburbs. Brown has given ethics some thought; he discusses it in a journalism writing course he teaches at Northwestern University, and he knows that in another era reporters at Christmas were like pigs at troughs. “It’s reasonable to put limits on gifts, particularly at this time of year,” he said. “But I know of a case where a guy from the Tribune has gone to DePaul to give a guest lecture, and they gave him a sweatshirt–and Joe confiscated that.”
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As he talked to me, Brown spotted a bank calendar hanging in the Oakbrook bureau, and he wondered aloud how it had managed to survive. Last year, he said, coming clean, he’d sat on the Tribune editorial board and occupied a private office in the Tower. His Reader calendar hung on his wall.
Detecting an element of amusement in my voice, he turned the tables. “What do you do with the stuff you get?” he asked.
Where are the others? I asked Leonard. Terry Brown’s calendar was the only one appropriated by Leonard’s staff.
“Absolutely exorbitant,” admitted Brad Cummings, editor of the Voice, which had helped the Marshall kids create last June’s paper. But there’d been all sorts of onetime start-up costs, Cummings said, and no economies of scale. The Voice proposed to extend its assistance to five other west-side high schools, publishing the six papers nine times each during the school year. The Voice submitted a $349,920 budget for the project, but the Board of Education wasn’t biting. Even the Marshall paper was dead.
