I’m Luke DiStefano and I’ll be helping Mark with the newsletter for a while. I’m a student at The College of New Jersey majoring in Journalism & Professional Writing, with a minor in Creative Writing. Outside of this newsletter, I am the Nation & World editor at The Signal newspaper, and I am a published poet—with my poetry collection “the gentlemen gallery” available on Amazon.
On this episode of The Journalism Salute (#250!), Mark Simon spoke to Joe Coughlin, the co-founder and editor-in-chief of The Record - North Shore, a nonprofit newsroom serving Chicago's North Shore suburbs. Joe has over 20 years within the journalism industry, as he is also a former editor of The Wilmette Beacon and Chicagoly magazine.
According to its website, The Record is dedicated to “producing credible, courageous, community-first journalism on a variety of platforms, including a daily website and weekly newsletters and podcasts. Our reporters are ingrained in their communities, allowing them to report stories that no one else can. Our goal is to build a reliable and sustainable community-news outlet that enables a better informed and engaged local populace and more educated and understanding future generation of news consumers.”
Joe represents a very local level of journalism, as The Record concerns itself exclusively with local news. As journalism becomes more and more digital, making ads harder to run among other external factors, oftentimes these more local stories can go undocumented as the few outlets remaining are usually too big to worry about these suburban stories.
“It's very hard to find local news and information you need to go about your everyday lives in terms of local stuff. What's going there, who should I vote for? Who are even these people on the ballot? That's difficult information to find in a lot of suburbs,” he said. “I think that was a big part of The Record’s pitch.”
In this vein, about the power of the local story, when asked about a particular time Joe felt that he had made an impact as a journalist he recalled a story he covered where a family man had gotten injured and was in the hospital.
“I believe it was a brain hemorrhage or something, and he was barely holding on in the hospital. Hospital bills were mounting. The family decided to raffle off his prize bike, which he built from scratch, but the way they set it up, they needed like a hundred raffle tickets sold to be able to get to what they needed to get those bills paid,” he said. “I wrote about it, and I also wrote a bit of a column about it and why it was important. They ended up getting to that goal and the person who won the bike gave it back. So they sent me a thank you email after they got the tickets”
“I didn't think we had that big of an impact and maybe we didn't. I guess it's hard to track those things, especially, 20 years ago. But, just to see that immediately happen and be part of it. Oh man, that was enchanting,” he said.
Joe represents the last line of defense in an age where local journalism is often forgotten in the face of bigger national and international stories. At the end of the day, journalism is meant to be the voice of the people, and sometimes it’s more effective to reach down to your fellow neighbor than reaching up towards some vague country-wide sentiment. Joe and The Record shows there is still good to be done from covering that local fundraiser.
Joe’s Salute: Block Club Chicago, a nonprofit news organization dedicated to covering Chicago’s diverse neighborhoods.