400,000 kids are the issue

Interviewed by Natalia Yarbrough and the Links class

Tribune reporter Azam Ahmed covers the Chicago Public Schools for the Chicago Tribune. He stopped by to chat with Columbia Links students about how he became a journalist.

Journalism? News? Not on the radar at first

I didn’t initially plan to do journalism in high school. I didn’t work for the school newspaper; I didn’t even read much of the newspaper when I was in high school. I knew about issues that were going on but it wasn’t until after college that I started thinking about the news. It was almost by default. I graduated and I didn’t know what I was going to do. I graduated from the University of Virginia. I saw this opening for an internship at the Wall Street Journal. I sent them an application; they called me in for an interview. We talked for a while. I think the guy took pity on me because I didn’t have anything else to do. So he gave me an offer. It was actually when I started doing journalism that I realized just how much fun it was.

European Union as 'classroom' experience, you could say

I was living in Brussels writing about the European Union, and I didn’t know anything about the European Union. I didn’t even know all the countries that were in the European Union. Suddenly I was engaged with this task of having to write about and think about this block of countries and what they mean to the world, what they mean to one another, their geopolitical status. I was reading about stuff that I had no idea about.

Please, don't embarrass yourself

And it wasn’t like class where you had to sit there and listen to someone else tell you information and you take notes and later you go back and research it. I had to research it myself. The stakes were high because I was going to have to publish this stuff and if I got it wrong it was going to be a huge embarrassment. It really grabbed my attention and fascinated me.

OK, I'm hooked

After that experience I wrote a few stories about various issues in the European Union. I was riveted. There’s nothing else I’d rather do than get paid to write, to think, to ask questions, to talk to a wide variety of people. That really convinced me that journalism was one of the things that probably would suit me well.

Back in the States . . . small potatoes

I came back to the States. I had a job but it wasn’t in journalism. I worked the job for six months and got an internship somewhere else. I did that internship at a small news wire that was practically going out of business; it was not a high profile job. I mean I went from interning at the Wall Street Journal to interning at a news wire that is I think is now out of business. So I did that for a little while and just kept applying for things and got another internship.

Leave it to Mom to snap you back

Meanwhile I was getting a lot of crap from my mom because I wasn’t making a lot of money. I quit a full-time job to do internships after I graduated college. But I ended up getting a job at the Dow Jones news wire which covers financial news. Pretty boring stuff. You write about certain economics. You write about currencies, you write about treasuries and all these things that at the time I just thought were excruciatingly boring.

Ping! A light goes on

You start learning, oh wow, that’s how currencies work and, oh wow, that’s how interest rates work. It was another great learning experience because I understood global economics in a more profound way than in any of my classes. I actually studied English literature and economics in college. But there is a difference from sitting in class and having someone tell you about interest rates and then actually watching somebody change interest rates and seeing what that does to a country's currency or seeing what that does to a country's trade.

Gotta be something more exciting . . . like Chicago

So I worked there for a little while and then got tired of talking to the people in the financial and economics world and really wanted to cover a city so I applied at the Tribune and ended up getting it.

Hearing the beat of CPS

For about maybe 2 1/2 years I covered the city. I covered crime, courts, schools, occasionally religion. A whole wide array of things. About six or seven months ago my editor asked me to cover Chicago public schools.

400,000 kids are the issue of the day

I love schools. To me [education] is one of the great civil rights questions of the 21st Century. It’s about equality. It’s about race relations. There is so many issues that Chicago public schools face and the stakes are very high when you’re educating 400,000 of the city’s kids. If you succeed, it means one thing for the city and if you fail it means something else.

Troubled youth

The youth violence question was an issue for me personally. A lot of the friends I grew up with got in trouble or were arrested. So I [understood violence] from a reporter's standpoint but I also understood and felt it from a personal standpoint. When I started covering the beat it was about trying to understand this massive group of schools with a $6 billion budget.

OK, so let me break it down for you, the issues I mean

How do I understand it? How do I figure all this stuff out? Hundreds of schools are spread out over the city. I could spend every day of the year visiting a school and I still wouldn't see all the schools in the district. How do you write about something like that? When you cover something like CPS you have to look for themes. One of the themes this year is definitely youth violence, another theme is selective enrollment schools. What are we going to do about them how are they going to guide admissions? A federal court just decided that they could no longer use an individual student’s race to determine admission. When they announced that plan the Supreme Court in 2007 said that they could no longer use an individual students race to get them into a school. It threw everything into disarray. Chicago has been using race for these magnet and selective schools for 30 years. So they came up with this idea that they were going to use economic factors. We’re going to use income. We’re going to use home ownership rates, but we’re not going to do it for individual students we’re going to do it for whole neighborhoods.