Posted by chicagomedia.org on September 25, 2008 at 11:42:06:
In Reply to: Robert Feder leaving Sun-Times posted by chicagomedia.org on September 23, 2008 at 07:16:09:
A 28-year refrain: 'Didya see Feder today?'
Robert Feder is leaving us. I hope he appreciates how this will screw up my morning newspaper routine.
When the Sun-Times, Tribune and New York Times are hurled against the front door at dawn, it is Feder I read first. Always first.
In the world of television, radio and print journalism, Feder knew more about what was happening in the places I worked than I ever did. Who was going to be hired. Fired. Promoted. Demoted.
For almost three decades in newsrooms across this city, a regular refrain -- or lament -- could be heard in the morning meeting: "Didya see Feder today?"
When I first came to work in Chicago, Gary Deeb was the reigning king of media columnists. Feder was his legman. And enterprise was his middle name, something he demonstrated at the Skokie Life newspaper before being hired by the Sun-Times. There he worked alongside a young Bruce Wolf and Paul Saltzman. Bruce later moved on to television and sportscasting. Paul is now Sun-Times metro editor.
Once, while covering a teachers strike for the school paper at Niles East High School in 1973, Feder hid in a closet during a meeting of the teachers union. None of the participants ever knew how Feder was able to report so much of what had gone on at the closed-door meeting.
When Deeb went off to do his commentaries on TV, the medium he often assailed for its vapidness, Feder took over Deeb's column. And made it his own, a must-read for news executives and reporters across the country.
Unlike Deeb, Feder never went on television or did radio. I mean, he refused to even be interviewed.
Rob believed that if you cover something critically, you can't belong to it. It's a conflict of interest.
In that regard, he is the rarest of breeds on the multimedia, multi-platform, synergistic landscape.
If you pull up Rob's Sun-Times biography, I assure you, you will learn almost nothing. So I'll tell you some of what makes his story so interesting and his contribution to journalism so important.
To do that, let me take you into Rob's office at the Sun-Times, a place so precise and immaculate that if you needed emergency hernia surgery, it could be performed on his desk. On the walls hang only three framed pictures. Two are of Walter Cronkite, the legendary CBS anchorman. It was in 1973, in high school, that Rob formed the Walter Cronkite fan club and became its president.
Cronkite is pictured in a crisp white shirt and tie, top button always buttoned. Same with Rob. Call it an outward expression of an inward conviction that there is a proper way to do things. Integrity matters most.
Rob Feder has called out a lot of journalists and media bosses on questions of conduct, conflicts of interest and a lack of transparency. Though I have been the beneficiary of a lot of Feder ink, most of it good, Rob called me one day back when I worked for CBS' "60 Minutes II" to ask if I had disclosed on the air, in a profile of Lakers' coach Phil Jackson, that he and I shared an agent? I hadn't. I should have.
When it comes to sources and front-page exclusives, he has no peer.
I still remember a cocky new Chicago Tribune reporter, hired from New York, to compete against Rob. The reporter asked me out for a drink to tell me that he was going to whip Feder's you-know-what. I laughed, wished him well and watched him leave town a year or so later.
Now it's Rob who's leaving.
The third photo on his wall is of Walt Disney World, a constant destination of the Feder family for years now. In the coming months, I imagine the Magic Kingdom will be calling.
And sometime after that, I hope, a return to the news business.
(Carol Marin)