Backgrounder: Cornelia Grumman

By Marie Iida

Cornelia B. Grumman
Cornelia B. Grumman. 
Photo: Chicago Tribune.

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Cornelia Grumman's first major assignment at her newspaper job in Raleigh, N.C., was to take a Greyhound bus from one end of the state to the other and write about what she saw and whom she met. Over the course of her bumpy road trip through tobacco fields and chicken-processing plants, the cub reporter found herself increasingly drawn to the stories that could not be found in press releases, government reports, or police blotters.

"I was hooked," she wrote, in an autobiographical sketch for "Meet the Tribune Editorial Board," a section published in the December 31, 2000 Chicago Tribune. "I wanted to see more of the world and to understand the connection between individuals, particularly those with faint voices, and the government institutions designed to serve them."

Years later, Grumman is a veteran political editorial reporter at the Chicago Tribune, in charge of the newspaper's political endorsements. She lives in Chicago with her husband James Warren, a deputy managing editor at the paper, and their one-year-old son, Blair.

Since joining the editorial board in 2000, her primary focus has been on social policy, education, juvenile justice, and the death penalty. "When someone such as Heidi comes along requiring special attention [...] humans sometimes forget about their obligation to take personal responsibility and solve problems," Grumman wrote in her August 9, 2000 editorial, "On Toothless Girls and Responsibility," in which she detailed how the policy-oriented and bureaucratic agencies in Illinois fail to help foster children with dire health issues.  Grumman's editorials on children and family issues received the Casey Medal for Meritorious Journalism in 2001.  Judges praised her editorial columns as "everything good advocacy writing should be [...] They remind readers that public policy problems affect actual human beings, often those least in a position to defend themselves." 

"I wanted to see more of the world and to understand the connection between individuals, particularly those with faint voices, and the government institutions designed to serve them."

Despite the impressive number of accolades she has received over the years, Grumman calls herself an "accidental editorial writer."  Her original ambition for life was to own a hotel and restaurant chain—an ambition that even took her to a cooking school in Paris.  However, at Duke University where she majored in public policy, professional journalists she met through the Dewitt Wallace Center's Visiting Media Fellows Program encouraged her to go into journalism. Grumman's first stint as a reporter began at the Raleigh News & Observer. In 1989, she took a berth at The Washington Post, where she worked as a part-time correspondent in Beijing, covering the student democracy movement in Tiananmen Square.  She also worked for an American record producer who wanted to bring rock and roll to China.  "I was put in charge of an international music hour," she said in an interview conducted for Duke University's Arts & Sciences News. "I picked out music from the Police to the Beatles to Elton John, explained the lyrics to the censors, covering up the sexual innuendos, and wrote a script for a Chinese deejay."

Grumman then went on to pursue a master's in public policy at the Kennedy School of government at Harvard.  "The Kennedy School enhanced my journalism by teaching me the broader context of issues," she said in the interview.  By 1994, Grumman was back in her native Illinois as a metropolitan, state government, and Internet reporter for the Chicago Tribune.

In 2003, Grumman won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize in editorial writing for her series of editorials "Restoring Justice," on Illinois' troubled death penalty system. "With the authority to impose the death penalty comes a responsibility to get it right," she wrote, in her October 3, 2002 editorial, "The Future of Capital Punishment."  In what became one of her last editorials of the series, she fervently added, "Now's the time to get it right. Get it right, or get rid of it."

Grumman's interest in the capital punishment system began when she was a state reporter.  In 1997, she witnessed a double execution, a sterilized, disturbingly uneventful experience that left her unsettled. "The state managed to make an intrinsically violent act so antiseptic it was almost boring," she wrote, in her November 23, 1997 editorial, "A Time to Die: Coming to Grips with the Ultimate Sanction." Such was the awful banality of the execution, she wrote, that "[a]fter one or two viewings, TV surfers would find more drama on a 'Beavis and Butt-head' rerun."

Cornelia Grumman at NYU
Cornelia Grumman speaks at NYU Journalism. Photo: Hazuki Aikawa. © Hazuki Aikawa, 2004.

After she joined the editorial board, Grumman and a team of Tribune investigative reporters devoted four years to reporting and writing about the Illinois capital punishment system. 

In her five-part series of editorials, Grumman cast a spotlight on erroneous eyewitness identifications—the single greatest contributor to wrongful convictions in the United States; questioned the execution of the mentally ill and juvenile offenders; and called for legislative reform in a state with the worst record of wrongful capital convictions in the country.

"This is not a system of justice," she wrote in "Fixing the Death Penalty" (September 29, 2002).  "This is a system of rank injustice. It is deeply fractured, and it must be repaired if Illinois is ever again to carry out a sentence of execution."

Grumman and her Tribune colleagues' work led then governor George Ryan to place a moratorium on the death penalty in Illinois and to organize a commission dedicated to the critical study and reform of the system.

Even as an editorial writer, Grumman has an investigative reporter's touch, backing up her arguments with concrete data and hard-won knowledge, accumulated from her travels around the state as a reporter. 

"When I came to the editorial board, I sort of thought, you still need to be a reporter, even though you're on the editorial board," she said, in a 2003 panel discussion at The Harris Graduate School of Public Policy Studies, in Chicago.

Grumman's vision, as an editorialist and as a reporter, has always been guided by her firm belief that journalism can play a significant role in promoting justice. 

"We are the in-between folks, between the research and sometimes the politics and the policies being enacted," she said in the panel discussion. "So I sort of see my job as translator[...] someone who can write clearly and concisely and, hopefully, powerfully to influence lawmakers."
 

Marie Iida is a junior at NYU, where she is majoring in print journalism.

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