Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Charles Storch worked for the Tribune for 30 years. Years ago he gave me more competition than I could handle as a media writer. His most recent assignment has been covering the arts and philanthropy. He wrote an item recently about the MacArthur Foundation giving $250,000 to Pro Publica, the not-for-profit news room created last year in New York City to do investigative journalism. If he’d stayed on the beat, Storch would have been writing more and more about journalism’s emerging business model — not-for-profit and financed by grants and subscribers, after the fashion of public radio.
As we talked by phone today, Storch looked around him in the features section. “Terry Armour used to sit on my right — it’s been almost a year since his death. Alan Solomon used to sit in front of me. Ever since he left [earlier this year] we have a little cut-out of him with his face plastered on it and a Hawaiian shirt on him.”
