DE Campus Life reporter 17

Sleeping in the woods exposed to freezing temperatures with no protection from the cold usually is not the pathway to success, but for Marc Chase, spending two days with the homeless in Carbondale was rewarding.

Chase, an SIUC alumnus who worked for the Daily Egyptian for four years, was honored last weekend for going beyond the call of duty for college reporters by taking an in-depth look at the plight of Carbondale’s homeless.

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Chase’s story was entered in a competition sponsored by the Associated Collegiate Press and the Los Angeles Times for Feature Story of the Year. Last weekend the story, No home, No hope, won third in the nation at the Associated Collegiate Press convention in Chicago.

The purpose of the competition is to recognize the initiative and original reporting of a situation. Students from colleges all over the country are eligible, and the entries are judged by the Los Angeles Times.

It’s a great honor, Chase said. The real honor to me was being able to write the story and have that experience.

Lance Speere, faculty adviser for the Daily Egyptian, said that instead of making phone calls and interviewing a few people, Chase put on his worst clothes and asked the homeless if he could spend two days with them.

He spent two nights in freezing temperatures to get that story, he said. He didn’t go home back to his bed at 11 o’clock.

Speere said the reason Chase’s story was so good was because he lived the story, which appeared in print in January.

He experienced the same thing they experienced, he said. That’s what made the story so good. That’s why other members of the media did follow-ups on the same story.

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Chase said that while working at the Daily Egyptian, the story on the homeless was the most interesting that he covered because it was hands-on. Chase was the DE’s investigative reporter at the time. Prior to that, he was editor-in-chief for three semesters.

Living among those people, you get a feeling of how difficult life is, he said. There is no one circumstance for being homeless. Sometimes it is the life they choose, or they don’t know any better. Some are mentally ill, and others are alcoholics. Some are disabled and can’t work, and they don’t know what their options are.

Chase said he would not have been able to do the story the way he did without experiencing homelessness first-hand.

I don’t think this was a case where you could’ve gone out and just interviewed, he said. I wouldn’t have had the context and been able to describe it the way I did if I wasn’t there.

Chase said the story was important because homelessness is low-profile in rural towns.

A lot of people in rural communities do not think about homelessness that much because it doesn’t slap you in the face like it does in Chicago, he said. It was a very enlightening experience.

Chase, of Wheaton, is a graduate student in journalism at the University of Illinois in Springfield. Chase’s story on the 1996 Carbondale Halloween riots earned him two other honors:first-place news story at the 1996 Illinois College Press Association, and eighth-place spot news story in the National Hearst Journalism Awards.

Chase said he is grateful to the editors of the Daily Egyptian for giving him freedom in his writing.

Lance Speere is a great newspaper adviser, as well as Lloyd Goodman (former faculty adviser for the Daily Egyptian), he said. If not for the freedom given to the staff at the Daily Egyptian, investigative or hard-hitting stories would not get written.