From The Chicago Reader:
Debra Pickett resigned from the Sun-Times Monday afternoon, minutes after being asked to do a story she thought was preposterous.”I laughed,”says Pickett, recalling her response when features editor Christine Ledbetter called with the assignment to breast-feed her infant son in public places and write about it. “I have to say I didn’t take it terribly seriously.” She’d seen other Sun-Times stories begin with an “outrageous premise” then get negotiated into something not beneath the dignity of adults. Some other day, she and Ledbetter might have begun negotiating. But not this time. Pickett, who was due to return from maternity leave February 26, tells me,”I said, ‘Well, there’s probably a conversation I need to have with Don Hayner before I can talk to you further about this assignment.'”Hayner’s the managing editor. Pickett had been trying to reach him all day. “I felt the ground had shifted a little bit under my feet while I was gone,” she says, and she wanted Hayner to tell her where she stood. Her resignation was already a possibility, perhaps even a likelihood. The breast-feeding assignment shifted the ground a little more. She called her husband, an Amtrak executive who was on a train between Washington and Philadelphia, and they talked. Then she reached Hayner. She didn’t ask where she stood. She quit. …
… She says the paper encouraged her boyfriend columns, which led to husband columns and baby columns — three of her last four columns mentioned her son (whom, by the way, she does nurse in public places).”That’s what my unique signature was,”she says.”That’s what people came to expect and associate me with. That was fine, a lot of fun, but it’s not necessarily who you want to be your entire adult life.”By the measure of what it covers and with whom, the Sun-Times is a small paper. There’s not much opportunity for personal reinvention. “The Sun-Times has a great staff writing about politics,”Pickett remarks, perhaps wistfully; an assignment to go forth and breast-feed is a pretty blunt way of being told your services won’t be required for that coverage. …
