The best thing about being a journalist is having the chance to learn new things.
This year, I and the other members of the Sun-Times Editorial Board learned so much more about our readers — because we made more of an effort to solicit and publish opinion pieces and letters to the editor.
Journalists are always eager to share the news they have uncovered. As opinion writers, the board is always eager, as well, to share its viewpoint on important news and issues.
But a strong newspaper also has to do a lot of listening — that’s where letters to the editor and opinion pieces, or op-eds, come into play — and then share that feedback with the broader community.
The editorial board made more of an effort to do that this year. We published guidelines for submitting op-eds and letters. And for the International Day of Democracy in September, we asked readers to tell us their views on the crisis in American democracy. Dozens of readers — from places as diverse as Roseland on the Far South Side, suburbs like Glenview and Elmhurst, villages like Manteno, and Austin on the West Side — did so. The Sun-Times is now publishing more content from readers, and we want to keep it up.
It’s hard to pick just a few standouts, but here are a few op-eds that had a real impact on us — and, we hope, on the Chicago area as a whole. Check out more in our Other Views section.
- Days after Jewish gravestones in a Waukegan cemetery were defaced with spray-painted swastikas, former TV investigative reporter and legal analyst Larry Yellen wrote that one of those vandalized gravestones belonged to his parents — linking a poignant personal story to the larger one about the alarming rise in antisemitism in our country.
- Architect and urban expert Philip Enquist spoke up for one of Chicago’s best-known landmarks — the Chicago River — and urged the state not to sell the Damen Silos site along the riverbank to an asphalt company. Instead, the river’s transformation into a place for recreation and a haven for wildlife should continue, he said. Let’s hope city and state officials are listening.
- Thousands of teaching positions in Illinois, including Chicago, were vacant when school started last fall — and as educator Kesa Thurman-Stovall of The Golden Apple Foundation pointed out, the state must find a way to attract, and keep, good teachers, who are essential to children’s learning and their future.
- A few weeks after the horrific mass shooting in Highland Park on July 4, Rabbi Meir Moscowitz of Lubavitch Chabad of Illinois made a plea for adults to teach young people the value of life. Yes, Illinois and the nation need effective gun laws — but we can’t ignore the moral element when it comes to preventing gun violence and mass shootings.
- It’s one thing to lament the city’s problems with guns, gangs and the drug trade, as so many Chicagoans do. It’s another thing altogether to live with an open-air drug market right on your block, as one West Side factory worker wrote in his account of the daily drug operation virtually right outside his door. The author, whose name we did not publish for safety reasons, got some action from his alderperson. Let’s hope it was enough.
- Photos can spark social change, as Loyola University history professor Elliott Gorn wrote not long after the mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas. Gorn recounted how photos of Emmett Till, the 14-year-old lynching victim who was beaten almost beyond recognition, helped spark the civil rights movement — and wrote that perhaps the same would happen if the media showed graphic photos of mass shootings.
- Watching the war in Ukraine unfold from afar, Michael Ebner, Lake Forest College emeritus professor of American history, drew parallels to his family’s history stretching back to their arrival as immigrants from Ukraine to the U.S. in 1905.
If you’re a policy expert, public figure, activist, civic leader — or just someone who cares about the city and has a viewpoint you want to share — check out our guidelines and write to us at opinions@suntimes.com or letters@suntimes.com.
Lorraine Forte is the editorial page editor of the Sun-Times.
