Author: Belinda Clarke
Danielle Svetkov (BSJ95)
Jeanne Ann is smart, stubborn, living in an orange van, and determined to find a permanent address before the start of seventh grade. Cal is tall, sensitive, living in a humongous house across the street, and determined to save her. Jeanne Ann is roughly as enthusiastic about his help as she is about living in a van. As the two form an unlikely friendship in this Middle-Grade debut, they’re buoyed by a cast of complex, oddball characters, who let them down, lift them up, and leave you cheering.
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John Bell (BSJ55)
John R. Bell, lifelong Chicago resident and frequent contributor to national financial and real estate magazines, died in January. He was 89.
Chicago Tribune Obituary
Born in Hammond, Ind., John moved to Chicago as a teenager and resided in Chicago ever since. He segued into writing the John Carmichael Texaco Sports Final for CBS Radio, and later to publicize peacetime atomic energy R&D as a member of the first public information staff at Argonne National Laboratory.
While at Argonne, he initiated coverage of the work that Argonne was doing by contacting CBS journalist Charles Collingwood. This resulted in a one-hour program produced and broadcast nationally on CBS.
John also held several corporate PR positions, including at J. Walter Thompson, General Motors, Montgomery Ward and H. Rozoff and Associates. He added real estate and financial writing to his portfolio when H. Rozoff and Associates obtained a number of real estate and financial accounts.
After he retired, he was a frequent contributor to Mortgage Banking, the official magazine of the Mortgage Banking Association, until it ceased publication in 2016. In writing to his editor at that time, he said that “Mortgage Banking was a unique publication—like no other in its field.” She wrote back agreeing that “the magazine was something very special,” adding “you were part of the magazine’s success.”
His articles for Mortgage Banking included coverage of the growth and recovery of the national office market; profile of Wrightwood Capital, the Chicago-based commercial/real estate finance firm; the growth of mixed use developments; the development of business/industrial parks; the nation’s Downtowns going green; multifamily apartment markets; five-star hotel markets; industrial recovery; the move to Downtowns; and economic growth in gateway cities.
He wrote cover stories for the National Real Estate Investor and his cover story profiles of Chrysler’s CEO Robert Eaton and Wilson Sporting Goods executive Jim Bough appeared in Industry Week (IW).
He was also a contributor to Pension Management, the Journal of Property Management (JPM), Progressive Railroading, Flying Careers, Air Cargo World, and Cahners Assembly Magazine.
John enjoyed music, the theater, and raising English Bulldogs—and said he had created the world’s finest barbecue sauce.
He and his wife, Virginia, celebrated their 68th wedding anniversary Sept. 8, 2019. They have two daughters, Monica (John) Muhs and Vanessa (Leon) LaSota; three grand-daughters, Dr. Amanda (Alex) Saratsis, Sara Muhs, and Leigh (AJ) Grimberg; and two great-grandchildren, Beckett and Eva Saratsis.
https://www.legacy.com/obituaries/chicagotribune/obituary.aspx?n=john-r-bell&pid=195132717&fhid=2060
Kris Goodfellow is the state Democratic Party-endorsed candidate for California State Senate, District 23.
Goodfellow was a graphics editor at The New York Times and the Chicago Tribune before running the graphics department at the Associated Press. She left journalism to pursue a career in technology and is currently the chief operating officer and co-owner of Voyager Search, a software company based in Redlands, Calif. For almost two decades, Goodfellow has been active in the community, located between Los Angeles and Palm Springs, but this is her first run for office.
“I got involved in the Hillary campaign in 2015, and when Donald Trump won, it took me a minute to pick myself up off the floor,” Goodfellow said. “But when I did, I decided that I needed to do more. That led me to realize that we need better representation at every level of government — and not only in the blue districts, but the purple and red ones, too.”
Goodfellow has been endorsed not only by the California Democratic Party, but also the California Teachers Association, Planned Parenthood, California League of Conservation Voters, a variety of unions and politicians at the local, state and national level. She has outraised her competitors on both sides of the aisle, shocking the political establishment in this traditionally red district of close to 1 million people.
The California primary is on March 3rd and there are a total of five candidates — three Republicans and two Democrats running. Goodfellow must be one of the top two vote getters to advance in California’s “jungle” primary system. If she wins the election, Goodfellow would be the first woman and the first Democrat to hold this seat in what has been a historically Republican district.
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Joseph Aaron (BSJ78)
Joseph Aaron, the longtime publisher and editor-in-chief of the Chicago Jewish News, died Nov. 16, 2019. He was 64.
“He loved that (the newspaper) gave him the forum to tell it like it is,” his brother Maury told the Chicago Tribune. “He said whatever was on his mind, regardless of whether or not it was controversial and regardless of whether it was a family friend. He said what he believed and he did not hold back.”
Born in Chicago, Aaron grew up in West Rogers Park, graduated from Hebrew Theological College in Skokie, and then earned a bachelor’s degree from Medill. He began his career as a reporter for Lerner Newspapers and later was the editor of JUF News, the monthly magazine of the Jewish United Fund.
In 1994, Aaron left the Jewish United Fund to start the Chicago Jewish News, which today has a circulation of about 40,000.
Denise Plessas Kus, the newspaper’s production manager, told the Tribune that Aaron’s weekly columns “showed that he was proud of his Jewish community and every once in a while saddened when it didn’t live up to what he thought they could be.”
Aaron explored the positives for Jewish people in the U.S. today, compared with how Jews have been treated at other times in history, said Rabbi Meir Shimon Moscowitz, regional director of the Lubavitch Chabad of Illinois. Moscowitz is the son of Aaron’s longtime friend Rabbi Danny Moscowitz, who died in 2014.
“He didn’t like people who always found the negative in others,” Moscowitz told the Tribune. “He liked people who found the positive in others. And he kept going at it for years and years, which is not easy. And he wasn’t afraid to say what he thought. He was very open and direct.”
Aaron recently celebrated the 25th anniversary of the founding of Chicago Jewish News. Aaron is survived by another brother, Fred; and two sisters, Susie Alter and Sharon Aaron.
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Heidi Barker (BSJ91)
Heidi M. Barker is the new vice president of corporate communications in the ethics and compliance department for Carnival Corporation.
Based at the company’s headquarters in Miami, Barker will report to Carnival Corporation Chief Ethics and Compliance Officer Peter Anderson, starting in March.
Barker joins the companywide ethics and compliance team led by Anderson, which was formed last year to help ensure a culture of compliance, learning and integrity inside Carnival Corporation and across its nine global cruise line brands, according to a press release.
The program’s goals are to meet or exceed all legal and statutory requirements, as well as to promote the highest ethical principles, the company said.
In this newly created position, Barker will lead all ethics and compliance communications for Carnival Corporation, including the key focus areas of health, environment, safety, security, culture and training, among others. As part of this role, she will coordinate compliance-related communications across the organization, working closely with Roger Frizzell, the corporation’s chief communications officer, and the compliance and communications teams within the company’s nine cruise brands.
Additionally, Barker will oversee communications for Operation Oceans Alive, Carnival Corporation’s environmental commitment and stewardship program, officially launched in 2018. Designed to promote a culture of transparency, learning and commitment within the corporation, Operation Oceans Alive ensures that all employees receive environmental education, training and oversight, while continuing the company’s commitment to protecting the oceans, seas and destinations in which it operates.
Photo by Andrew Skwish
Story by Thea Showalter (BSJ22)
Amidst a national crisis for local news organizations, Medill is seeking ways to save and strengthen the local news industry through the Local News Initiative (LNI), a groundbreaking project that aims to diagnose the challenges facing smaller news organizations and develop solutions.
For the past year and a half, Medill has collaborated with three newspapers, receiving hard-to-get data to analyze in exchange for providing the papers with crucial research on how to navigate the changing terrain of news media.
“LNI is developing new insights into reader behavior that is helping local news organizations grow their numbers of digital subscribers,” said Tim Franklin, senior associate dean of Medill and leader of the Local News Initiative. “This work is critically important now as local news organizations pivot from an advertising-supported business model to one focused on reader revenue.”
Newspapers have historically made the vast majority of their revenue from advertising, according to Associate ProfessorTom Collinger, Executive Director of the Medill IMC Spiegel Digital & Database Research Center. But as the habits of readers change, news organizations are increasingly depending on revenue from subscribers, not advertisers, leading to a pressing need to understand subscriber behavior.
In the fall of 2018, researchers from Medill’s Spiegel Research Center received 13 terabytes of subscriber data from its three partner papers— the Chicago Tribune, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the Indianapolis Star (Indy Star). The data would help the researchers probe questions about local news readership that had never before been answered.
“I’m especially proud that the analytical work that we have been doing is work that in many other industries would be easily available now online,” Collinger said.
But understanding local news subscriber behavior was far from easy. Researchers at The Spiegel Research Center had to merge two vast sets of data— subscriber data and clickstream data— to map how individual subscribers behaved when reading online.
In February of 2019, LNI came out with initial findings: in order to keep readers as digital subscribers, news organizations must encourage them to develop a regular reading habit and provide unique local content to make their subscription valuable.
Over the summer and fall of 2019, Franklin, along with Spiegel Research Center Director and Professor Ed Malthouse, presented LNI findings at the annual conferences for the Newspaper Association Managers, News Leaders Association, and Online News Association.
“We’ve gotten a whole lot of publicity on this,” said Malthouse. “It’s been very satisfying to see the work take off like this.”
For the Chicago Tribune, partnering with the LNI has provided an “outsider’s perspective” on audience data that, alongside the Tribune’s internal data analysis, has helped to “paint a broad picture of what content areas are the most valuable” to readers, said Christine Taylor, managing editor of audience at the Tribune.
The findings have shown the Tribune that its readers are “overwhelmingly” smartphone readers, prompting the Tribune to focus on its app in 2020, and explore tools to boost mobile engagement.
“It forces us to think about how we prepare and produce our content to meet those readers,” said Taylor. “It just makes us think differently about our deadlines— it makes us think differently about how we construct our stories. It’s really forcing the newsroom to just think very differently about how it approaches content.”
A year after the LNI began working with the subscription data, the LNI won a Google Innovation Award in October 2019 in order to build what is called a “subscriber engagement index,” a digital tool that will show local newspapers how their actions are impacting their subscribers in real time.
A newspaper that shares its data with the index will be able to see how its subscribers behave compared to other papers using various metrics, and how those behaviors contribute to retention and subscription rates.
“That’s where we’re going. We’re building this out as we speak,” said Collinger. “And it’s a significant piece of data work….The industry has never seen anything like this.”
In the next few months, LNI will also examine the “finances of customer retention,” said Malthouse. Finding strategies to encourage a reader to subscribe to a newspaper is only the first step.
“If you have a new customer, you have to nurture that relationship,” said Malthouse. “Teaching the news organizations how to take this new customer and nurture that relationship, and turn that person into a regular reader who values your content is the name of the game. So that, I think, is going to be a big part of where we go.”
Collinger added that Medill is uniquely qualified to lead the way on local news research, because the Local News Initiative is a product of all the programs that make Medill different.
“Medill uniquely has a world class journalism program and a world class integrated marketing communication program, and the integration of the best of those two things made this possible,” said Collinger. “It is not what makes Medill the same, but what makes us different in complementary ways that has allowed this to be such a wonderful expression of where we believe media is going.”