Rights of the Accessed
The penguin story, as you never would have guessed, is an analogy. The real issue here isn’t predatory nature magazines. It’s magazines and newspapers licensing their contents to electronic databases. It’s writers flat on their backs on the centerline of the nation’s information superhighway.
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“We’ve been doing research on this issue the last three years,” says Judith Cooper, an NWU vice president who lives in Chicago. “It’s a matter of principle more than anything else. If our future’s being decided, we want to be part of that decision-making process.”
“People should not be signing away their electronic rights,” says Cooper, who told us that book publishers in particular are beginning to ask for them. “Nobody knows exactly what they are. Nobody knows exactly what they’re worth.
Our last ’93 column cited a piece Lynn Sweet wrote from Washington about a Harvard study on segregation in America’s public schools. Sweet, one of the SunTimes’s three Washington reporters, focused on segregation in Illinois, Chicago, and northwest Indiana.
The Washington bureau of the Sun-Times is on roughly the same footing as the City Hall bureau and the one in the federal courthouse. It reports to the metro editor. This humble station at least offers the virtue of clarity; there’s no question about what the bureau’s duties are–they’re to work up Chicago stories that originate in the capital.
The phone rang at 3 AM. It was one of Washington’s crack investigative reporters, though not a name you’d recognize. Years ago we’d met out west somewhere covering some calamity. The details of that are vague now.
