Every cover story is born of collective wisdom, and this week it’s unusually deep. In our cover story, “Wheeler-dealer with a cause,” reporters Christi Parsons and Ray Long draw on their combined 30 years of reporting on Illinois government.
Christi and Ray work out of the Tribune’s Springfield bureau and are charged with covering the cast of 177 members of the Illinois General Assembly, as well as the triumphs, travails and shenanigans of state government. This spring, as battles grew more contentious and complicated, the duo realized that one of the more powerful figures, and one largely obscured from view as Michael Madigan and Rod Blagojevich grabbed the headlines, was Senate leader Emil Jones.
Over the course of the summer, as the legislative session repeatedly deadlocked in an interminable dance, Christi and Ray worked on this cover story as they wrote daily stories about the impasse. Throughout the long session, they grabbed Jones for interviews and caught his comrades and critics as they passed, finally returning to the bureau and adding all the notes to a voluminous “Emil” file.
“We wrote the story in between floor debates and press conferences,” Christi recalls. “Interestingly, we thought that taking on this additional task at the height of the legislative season would be exhausting. Instead, it added a new dimension to the story we were reporting for the daily paper.”