RPCV WRITER WINS 2007 STUDS TERKEL AWARD

Stephen Franklin, Labor and Workplace Reporter, The Chicago Tribune

Stephen Franklin (Turkey 1967-69)
Labor and Workplace Reporter, The Chicago Tribune
When it comes to journalistic heroes, Stephen Franklin looks back a ways, to Charles Dickens, who covered Parliament before becoming the novelist who in many ways defined the 19th century English working class. Franklin finds sources in real life whose stories often echo in their detail and pathos the kind of stories Dickens once told.


Those stories are about people like Raul Rosas, paralyzed from the waste down after a work-related accident and living in an unfinished basement, and Roger Kobernick, a truck driver finding it impossible to make ends meet after more than 20 years in business.

To get Kobernick’s story as part of a larger piece on the increasing hours owner-operator truckers drive today, Franklin rode with the trucker from Chicago to Miami. One of his many collaborators at the paper, Abel Uribe, rode back with the driver. The two have worked together on many stories, along with reporter Darnell Little providing computer-assisted reporting skills and quantitative backup for stories and pictures on injured workers. Uribe was actually the first one to pitch the story that featured Rosas, and found many of the sources. “I call Steve my agent,” Uribe says. “He grew the story” from an idea into a project.

Franklin has documented ‘the dirtiest job in America’—cleaning the line between shifts at a pork-packing plant in North Carolina—and, with a team of other Tribune staff, about the ‘feminization of immigration.’ That piece, a year-long project, looked at the journeys to the U.S. of women from Guatemala, Mexico, India, Nigeria, Norway, and other countries (still online at www.chicagotribune.com/borders). Working collaboratively with others at the paper to focus on big issues—whether injured workers, immigration, or other issues that deserve more ink—is an important part of his work, Franklin says.

As labor and workplace reporter for the Chicago Tribune, he reports to the business editor. But Franklin’s stories about labor and, in recent years, immigrant workers in the U.S., plus his foreign-correspondent coverage of Middle East wars make it hard to pin his beat down. That’s typical Franklin, according to his former editor in the mid-1980s at the Detroit Free Press features section Mike Smith, now on staff at Northwestern University’s Medill Management Center. “Steve had a desk in features, a desk in the business department and a desk in the city room. No editor wanted to get rid of his desk because they valued his contributions,” Smith recalls.

Franklin knew he wanted to be a journalist from the time he was six, growing up on Coney Island in Brooklyn. Franklin spent his first years after college in Turkey in the Peace Corps, then worked at a school for boys in New Jersey. As editor of his college radio station he covered some of the Civil Rights movement, then went on to work for papers in Washington, D.C., New Jersey, Pittsburgh and Philadelphia before moving in 1980 to the Free Press, where he recalls covering factory shutdowns and the growing Arab community in the Detroit area.

Franklin had learned Turkish while in the Peace Corps; in Detroit he went back to school to study Arabic in order to better cover the community. His language ability has helped him to get overseas to cover Afghanistan, the Iraq-Iran war, the Gulf War in 1990-1991 as well as the current conflict in Iraq and the intifada in Israel and the Palestinian territory. After joining the Tribune, he took classes in Spanish.

Studs Terkel has always inspired Franklin, the reporter says. Although the two never really met, their paths did cross after Franklin published his book Three Strikes, on labor unrest in Central Illinois (Franklin notes he consciously modeled the opening on the first lines of Dickens’ Bleak House).The reporter was delighted by Studs’ generosity when he learned that the older man had called the publisher to offer an unsolicited blurb citing the work’s contribution to telling stories about “The unsung heroes… our working men and women.”

The rest of the winter and spring Franklin will be in Egypt teaching journalists on a Knight International Press Fellowship. He has received two Lisagor awards for business reporting in 2001 and 1995, and a George Polk Award for consumer interest reporting with Marcia Stepanek at the Free Press in 1983. Franklin lives on the North Side with his wife, director of a local social services agency. The couple have two children.

www.chicagotribune.com
Read more and view the work of Stephen Franklin and his partners at the Chicago Tribune as they document the stories of, "Throwaway Workers"

[Underwritten by the Richard H. Driehaus Foundation and presented annually, the Studs Terkel Media Awards honor outstanding media professionals for excellence in covering and reflecting Chicago's diverse communities.]