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EDITOR'S NOTEBOOK

We're saying goodbye
to our Statehouse reporter

by Peggy Boyer Long

During her tenure at the magazine, Jennifer Halperin has helped to broaden our understanding of this large and diverse state. It will be difficult to replace her.

Every time we turn around, it seems, another good reporter is leaving the Statehouse Press Room.This time it's our own bureau chief. After four years at the magazine, Jennifer Halperin is heading to Ohio. She's moving at the end of the year to Columbus, Ohio's capital city, though we've tried to suggest (and we admit to some prejudice on this point) the politics of that state are unlikely to be as engaging as Illinois'.

Like many journalists who have reported on Illinois state government, Jennifer began her career in the Capitol Press Room while working on her master's in public affairs reporting at Sangamon State University (now the University of Illinois at Springfield).

In 1989, she served her internship in that program with the Chicago Tribune, helping to cover a spring legislative session that debated riverboat gambling, boosted the state's income tax and restructured Cook County's judiciary. She saw the tail end of Jim Thompson's stint as governor, and the beginning of Rich Daley's as mayor.

Jennifer then moved to Florida, where she spent three years as a reporter and editorial writer for The News-Journal of Daytona Beach.

She joined the magazine in 1992. During her tenure here, Jennifer covered a gubernatorial campaign, profiled our state's top officials and examined key issues, including education funding and environmental protection.

Perhaps more important, she helped to broaden our understanding of this large and diverse state. She told our readers about a rise in political power among the state's Latino population, and a cultural reawakening among Orthodox Jews. She wrote about Chicago's Black Metropolis and Rockford's century-old ethnic clubs (see page 32).

Inevitably, her reporting took her out of the Statehouse: to boarded-up factories in Danville, the troubled streets of East St. Louis, flooded towns along the Mississippi River bottoms and farm fields outside Carlinville. (She was named a finalist in the Peter Lisagor Awards for Exemplary Journalism for that story, an analysis of the potential hazards of pesticides in our drinking water.)

It will be difficult to replace her. An advertisement (see page 7) details the qualifications required of the next person who will run our Statehouse bureau (experience in government reporting for the print media).

But in the final analysis, we're looking for a reporter who will share our commitment to thorough and thoughtful coverage of state government and politics, and the issues that face our readers.

That commitment has become more critical in this so-called age of "devolution." Unaccountably, as the federal government turns over more responsibilities for social programs to the state, the media have devoted fewer resources to covering the Statehouse. (A case in point: Two newspapers have closed their full-time Statehouse bureaus within the last six months.)

We believe that makes our comprehensive coverage of the state more valuable to our readers. And the work of our new Statehouse bureau chief more essential.

In the meantime, we're already missing Jennifer.

4 / November 1996 Illinois Issues