Byline Confidential Gregory Pratt

Some people think Daily Southtown columnist Phil Kadner is the state's best journalist.This episode is a good chat with the 37-year veteran about his life in the news business, mostly covering the city's south suburbs. Phil shares touching stories about the homeless and south suburban charities and tells fascinating tales about:Racial change in the city’s neighborhoods (Neo-Nazis in Marquette Park)

Deciding not to become a sportswriter at Northern Illinois
University (“I found it more corrupt in many ways than anything I ever covered
on any political beat, covering police, all sorts of things…”)

The tragic tale of a shooting involving a carney, the NIU
basketball team and a player recruited into NIU who’d been stashed at a
community college

A particularly memorable tale
about Robbins drug dealers (“I tell these kids not to sell drugs and they
tell
me we’re making more than your police officers are making, go away”)I really enjoyed this talk with Phil, who is a true classic newsman, so check it out!

Elvia Malagon covers crime for the Times of Northwest Indiana.A fun talk about:An alleged serial killer in Gary IndianaCrazy FloridiansThe importance of storytelling relatives, like the grandmother who "always tells these really depressing stories" that "sound really uplifting" but end with deathWith stints at newspapers in Florida and Kentucky, and with the New York Times Student Journalism Institute, Elvia has a lot of fun stories to tell, so check it out!

As a child, Jackie Spinner always wanted to be the first of
her siblings to tell her mother what they’d seen.

That instinct took her from the Daily Egyptian at Southern
Illinois University to the Washington Post and Iraq. Now she’s a media reporter
with the Columbia Journalism Review and a professor at Columbia College
Chicago. Jackie's a great reporter and we had a good chat, so check it out! 

Univision's Jazmin Beltran is an Emmy Award-winning journalist, educator, person with a lot of neat stories to tell. From a small paper in Racine, Wisconsin to Spanish media, she's done all sorts of jobs: web publishing, stints on the assignment desk, broadcast journalist. A fun chat and a good conversation, so check it out!

He's been misidentified as "The Bearded Bandit" and dubbed "The" Matt O'Connor in Japan.Today, Matt is a "mild-mannered" newspaper editor at the Chicago Tribune, where he's covered public corruption at federal courts (including corrupt Gov. George Ryan), crime in Cook County (the Dowaliby kid-killing trial), and business. Before that, he's got amazing tales from his early days covering Caterpillar for the Peoria Journal Star, which sent him all around the world for a 10-part series about the giant corporation's future back in the day. A fun chat with a forty-year veteran who's got interesting stories about "deceptively dangerous" Jeffrey Erickson, a notorious bandit and former police trainee, and the points-shaving scandal at Northwestern.

On a beautiful summer afternoon, Mary Schmich and I sat near the top of Tribune Tower and talked about her life in journalism:Mary’s discovery, at an early age, that you could have fun with words (“Fuse confusion”). Her memories of working at the LA Times, where she worked on a typewriter in the fog of cigarette smoke and learned to write for newspapers by going through copy sheets. Why she believes being a journalist is being “in the business of connecting people to each other.”We talk about returning to the South, where she grew up, as a Tribune national correspondent, her time covering Jim Bakker’s trial and Tammy Fay Bakker, and her earliest days writing a column in Orlando. “Never be afraid to look stupid.” A fun talk with a great newswoman.