Because mayors of Chicago have been known to die in office, the city has a need for a statutorily designated successor. But because the vice mayor has no duties besides waiting in the wings, his office would seem to have no need for an annual budget of more than $100,000.
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That was the effect Devlin’s reporting had on at least two other journalists who read it. Patrick Boylan runs a site of his own, the Welles Park Bulldog. When he spotted the name of Monica Schulter—the daughter of his local alderman, the 47th Ward’s Eugene Schulter—in the list of vice-mayoral budget beneficiaries, he called the alderman for comment. He didn’t get it, but he posted a story anyway, scrupulously giving credit where it was due and linking to Devlin’s original.
Aaron Stern, a paid intern serving as a producer for WTTW’s Chicago Tonight, read Devlin, talked to him, and then began working up a story of his own, which aired the evening of April 13. The next morning Boylan called me. He was surprised that the WTTW report hadn’t touched on Devlin’s main point—that the vice mayor’s money was being spread around the aldermen’s families and cronies. And he was ticked that Lake Effect News had gone uncredited. Host Phil Ponce asserted in his introduction: “Chicago Tonight has found a little-known city office that has a budget and staff, but no actual ongoing duties.”
The next decision was what to do with it. Swanson and Devlin discussed turning it over to the Tribune, but when the Trib began pounding the city over what it called a “stealth payroll” controlled by the City Council Finance Committee that was enriching the aldermen’s friends and relatives, they decided to run their story themselves. “This was the other shoe, another account no one’s looked at yet,” Devlin told me. “We thought, ‘We have to contribute to this dialogue.’ It lit a fire under our butts.”
“I think we’re talking about two different sets of ethics,” says Boylan. The traditional response of mainstream media to a good story by the competition has been to try to recover the story and advance it, if possible, while giving the competition not an ounce of credit. The ethos of new media is far more collective: they’re all in this together, and when one breaks a good story that the others pick up, everyone benefits if the originator receives not only conspicuous credit but a link.
In which case, Boylan argues, tiny new media sites like his own and Swanson’s need more from the MSM than mere appreciation. They need muscle. “The $100,000 line item isn’t important. It’s how they used it,” he said. “I went to Schulter to ask for comment. He hasn’t called me back on anything. He’s shut me down.”
