“It did give us a picture of mass shootings that we don’t usually get.

“When Jenn called me, I knew that what we had was pretty powerful,” Brown said. WBEZ was mostly running the Sun-Times’ stories on their website. 31 of this year, the owner of the Sun-Times. And she also reached out to Tracy Brown, chief content officer at WBEZ, Chicago’s public radio station and since Jan.

She reached out to the newsroom’s photo editor and a crime specialist. He saw the value in running the photo of the women on the steps. Although she was leaning toward running the photo, she asked her managing editor what he thought. She keeps her inclinations to herself as she seeks input. As an executive, she’s pensive and inviting. I’ve had several conversations with Kho by text and phone since that day. People are covering up the dead and trying to help the wounded and people are still running and trying to get out. Like, ‘Oh my gosh this really tells the story.’ There’s so much chaos involved, that’s evident in the photo. Like in a journalistic way I kept thinking about it. “But one of them in particular I just kept thinking about it. “At first, I was like, ‘Oh my God this is gruesome,’ and, you know, we can’t run them,” Kho told me five days later. Someone is bending over another person on the ground. In the background are abandoned bikes and strollers. In the third photo, two women are dead, sprawled on concrete steps, their faces and shoulders covered, blood spilling down the steps. In another photo, at the base of a bench, thick, dark blood coagulates. In one photo, a man in shorts lies dead on the sidewalk on his back, his legs and shoes soaked in bright-red blood, which was still flowing from his body. Sweet describes her experience in a first-person column that was published that day. She was back in Los Angeles, sleeping, on July 4 when she awoke to a flurry of calls breaking through her do-not-disturb settings.Īfter the first stories went online, Dave Newbart, the interim managing editor, asked Kho what she wanted to do with Sweet’s photos. She flew to Chicago, caught COVID-19 and spent most of the time in a hotel room, running the Supreme Court abortion decision coverage and meeting people by Zoom. When the Sun-Times’ interim editor resigned, Kho gamely agreed to step in immediately in early June. 1 start date, giving her a chance to relocate from Los Angeles and wind down several consulting jobs. When Kho accepted the offer to run the Sun-Times, she envisioned a Sept. In those early minutes, Sweet posted three photos to Slack of what she saw, taken on her phone. Reading through that Slack history, Kho recreates the day.

And Sweet contributed descriptions and quotes from witnesses. An audience editor embedded the first social posts. That channel became the primary place for coordinating the breaking news coverage. So, I’m at that Highland Park parade, possible shooting incident, panic hitting parade, call me.” Kho read me Sweet’s first post on the city desk Slack channel. Jennifer Kho, the paper’s new executive editor, had been on the job for three weeks. When a mass shooter opened fire on a Fourth of July parade in a Chicago suburb, the Chicago Sun-Times’ Washington bureau chief, Lynn Sweet, happened to be at the parade.

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