Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
The other reaction was to marvel that Rosenthal didn’t know Chicago already has a journalism hall of fame. It was founded in 1985 by Jerry Davis and Jerry Field, retiring and incoming presidents of the Chicago Press Club, and though the press club collapsed two years later, the hall of fame survived, being reconstituted eventually under the aegis of the International Press Club of Chicago. The IPCC was founded in 1992 by Field, a longtime publicist, and Arnie Matanky, publisher of the Near North News. Field is a friend; Matanky, who died in 2004, was the most boorish journalist I’ve ever met.
You might be thinking, no wonder Rosenthal demands a new hall of fame — this one won’t do. Actually, this one will do fine. Having no other purpose, the IPCC can focus on the question of who the worthiest worthies are, and I will personally vouch for Jerry Field’s gravitas whenever he bends to that task. Compare Rosenthal’s nominees with the IPCC’s inductees — each list exposes some of the other’s egregious oversights, and if the IPCC has been too often swayed by cronyism, so was Rosenthal, I’d say, by sentiment and courtesy. To add my own two cents’ worth, any hall of fame that excludes –as both Rosenthal and the IPCC do — the founders of the Reader, who invented a new business model for urban print journalism that swept the country, and Reader reporter John Conroy cannot possibly be taken seriously.
