Undercover Reporting

A five-month investigation, led by Pamela Zekman, into the Michigan Avenue "abortion profiteers," and their dangerous and unsavory, unsanitary practices, including performing the procedure regularly on women who were not pregnant.

After hearing from a source that janitors, without washing, were sometimes used to move patients from surgery rooms to their beds, a  reporter poses as a janitor at Von Solbrig Hospital. The series, a Task Force investigation, also examines the institution's encouragement of unnecessary procedures for welfare patients.

Tribune Investigative Task Force member William Mullen uncovered evidence of widespread election fraud in the March 21 presidential primaries in Chicago while working undercover as a clerk in the Chicago Board of Election Commissioner's City Hall office.

Reporters, hired to work with phony references in nursing homes for the poor, uncover filthy conditions, unqualified employees (as evidenced by their own hiring), and undignified care of the elderly, often in the name of profit.

Charles Chapin, editor of The Chicago Times, hired Nell Cusak to investigate female working conditions in Chicago's factories.  This 21-part series (published under the byline Nell Nelson) was based on the author's experience working undercover in several Chicago factories.  Nelson named specific factories and managers she encountered, detailing the working conditions after spending only a brief time in each factory. 

Upton Sinclair's original serial version of "The Jungle," published in 1905 by the socialist newspaper, Appeal to Reason, edited and republished the following year by Doubleday after McMillan reneged. The newspaper serialized Sinclair's novel nearly week by week between February 25 and December 16, 1905 and offered the completion of the series in a special supplement that readers had to request separately. PDFs of the articles provided courtesy of Special Collections Pittsburg State University, Pittsburg, Kansas.