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Move on doesn’t mean abandon. Which is why, when I read Mark Brown’s tribute to John Conroy in the Wednesday Sun-Times, I didn’t think twice about this passage: “His editor suggested he move on to the next subject, and he tried. After all, he told himself, he wasn’t having much impact. But he kept coming back.”
That’s not true. The subject of Conroy’s heroic reporting was Jon Burge and police torture, of course, and the Reader welcomed and proudly published his stories on the subject from 1990 to 2007. That’s when Conroy, whom Rhodes aptly calls “a journalist more deserving than anyone in this city of a Pulitzer Prize,” was laid off, again in Rhodes’s words, “so the Reader could take his surprisingly paltry salary off the books.” Unfortunately, paltry money is the coin of the realm around this place, whose owners recently filed for bankruptcy. Needless to say, since Burge was arrested we have wished Conroy were still writing for us. But that’s something we’ve wished since he left.
