CHICAGO — Here's what we're reading around the Web today.
Hanging Out in the Frunchroom: Shameless plug alert: DNAinfo's social media director Jen Sabella will be reading at the Frunchroom Thursday. The new reading series is in Morgan Park and features storytellers who either live on the South Side or grew up there. Other readers include fantastic Chicago writers and storytellers Adrienne Samuels Gibbs, Natalie Moore, Dmitry Samarov and Chuck Sudo. Read more about it here or just come to O'Rourke's Office, 11064 S. Western Ave., at 7:30 p.m.
Tuition Blues: Senior editor Andrew Herrmann is cringing over a graphic in The DePaulia, the student newspaper of DePaul University, which looks at tuition increases at a variety of colleges in Chicago over the past 10 years. It's brutal. DePaul's sticker price jumped 74 percent over the past decade; the tab for incoming freshman next year is $35,680, The DePaulia says. A DePaul spokesman says that the Lincoln Park school is trying to soften the blow by offering more student aide but tuition increases are "a fact of life" and "the market decides what it's willing to pay."
Meanwhile, a new report says that enrollment in public universities and colleges has grown over the past five years in 48 states. Illinois isn't one of them. In fact, we're the loss leader with a drop of 4.1 percent. Illinois is one of three states to increase state spending for higher ed over the past five years but "the increases are primarily to cover historical underfunding of pension programs," says "State Higher Education Funding FY 2013."
How to Cover Quacks: In light of the recent drama over nutrition activist and blogger Food Babe (including a hilarious, scathing, science-based takedown on Gawker that made the rounds last week), an essay on Vox that examines how journalists can ethically "cover quacks like Dr. Oz or the Food Babe" got senior editor and former science writer Lizzie Schiffman Tufano thinking. The writeup, by Julia Belluz, places the onus on reporters and writers to balance their coverage of headline-grabbing public figures with responsible backup from qualified sources. Written as a step-by-step guide for the media, the piece warns of the risk to "create controversy for its own sake" and make martyrs out of fringe philosophers. To tweak the old adage, "if a blogger says something's toxic, check it out" — preferably with someone who's studied in that field.
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