Across a 28-year career as a copy editor and content editor at the Chicago Tribune, Jeffrey D. Carlson was an exacting copy editor with high standards and a keen desire to protect the newspaper’s reputation for accuracy.
“He was consistently the copy editor of choice for big stories,” said John Chase, the Tribune’s deputy metro editor for government and politics. “He did so much more than fix grammar and style — he combed through every sentence like a private investigator, catching things reporters and editors had missed, asking the questions a skeptical reader would ask. When you’d answered all his questions and agreed with his fixes, you felt so much better about what you were sending out into the world.”
Carlson, 68, died of renal cell carcinoma on April 21 at the City of Hope National Medical Center in Duarte, California, said Marcy Carlson, his wife of almost 44 years. A resident of Stevenson Ranch, California, since 2022, Carlson previously had lived in Schaumburg and Deerfield.
Born in Chicago in 1957, Carlson grew up in Deerfield and graduated from Deerfield High School. He attended Columbia College Chicago and the College of Lake County before earning a bachelor’s degree in English from the University of Illinois Chicago in 1986.
Carlson did not begin his career in newspaper journalism. A music enthusiast, he first worked for Sound Unlimited, a record and video distributor near Skokie, where he met his wife. Hired to Sound Unlimited’s order desk, he eventually headed that department before holding roles in the firm’s art department, including working on a mailer that carried a column he authored.
In 1988, Carlson began working at the suburban Daily Herald, where he spent a decade as a reporter and an editor. He eventually became a sportswriter there, covering the Chicago Blackhawks.
In April 1998, Carlson left the Herald to join the Tribune as a copy editor. He started on the same day as longtime Tribune columnist Heidi Stevens, who is now a syndicated columnist for the Tribune Content Agency.
“Jeff and I sat next to each other during the training, and I was so intimidated — I was 23 and a one-year reporting resident and had worked in one newsroom in Indiana — and Jeff immediately had a kind face and kind presence about him,” Stevens recalled. “I immediately felt less nervous and less intimidated and less like I didn’t belong here. That day honestly carried me through so many years at the Tribune. And every time I got to work with him in different departments over the years, on different shifts, I just felt like he was in my corner. And he was fantastic at his job — exacting and tough and not afraid to call a writer out on what a writer needed to be called out on, but also he was so funny and so kind and had such a good heart.”
Former Tribune chief copy editor Stu Werner, who left the paper in 2019 to join The Washington Post, said reporters whose work Carlson edited “really appreciated the fact that this guy was not going to have them working without a net.”
“He was going to ask the tough questions, and if there was something that didn’t seem to quite add up, he was going to press it,” Werner said. “His integrity was what stood out most to me. It was really important to him that we did things to the highest standards, and if that meant having an uncomfortable conversation with someone, he would do it. It wasn’t personal. The best journalists appreciated that.”
Colleen Kujawa, who has been the Tribune’s opinion content editor since 2019, previously had toiled alongside Carlson on the paper’s metro copy desk from 2012 until 2018. At that time, the night desk “was an intense place as we all worked to put the paper to bed,” she recalled.
“Humor helps you manage in an environment like that, especially with repeat exposure to the darkness of news stories about violence and tragedy,” Kujawa said. “Jeff was an elite wisecracker. He voiced frustrations that we all felt with razor-sharp zingers, and by doing so, he helped us get through our shifts and survive. He could come across as stoic and hardened sometimes, but when we all got to joking, I saw the light dance in his eyes.”
Carlson copy edited a 2021 series, “The Failures Before the Fires,” a collaboration between the Tribune and the Better Government Association. The series, which was the result of a nearly two-year investigation, revealed that at least 61 men, women and children had died in 42 fires that had occurred after Chicago officials had been warned of major fire safety issues in their residential buildings.
Chase, who worked at the BGA at the time, was one of the editors of the series. He recalled Carlson’s copy editing improvements.
“Jeff wouldn’t let you get away with anything vague. If a sentence could be read two ways, he’d find both of them,” Chase said. “He wasn’t a copy editor who just caught typos. Jeff caught your assumptions and would want to make sure every sentence was airtight.”The series won a Pulitzer Prize for local reporting.
Carlson handled copy editing duties for nearly every major investigative and enterprise project published by the Tribune in the past six years. Most recently, he had overseen copy editing for many of the Tribune’s stories about the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Operation Midway Blitz.
During his career, Carlson won the Tribune’s Beck Award for outstanding editing, and in 2022, he was a finalist for the Robinson Prize for copy editing awarded by ACES: The Society for Editing, a national group of editing professionals, educators and students.
“The human touch he brought to his work — it also extended to being a co-worker and a colleague,” Stevens said. “He was just the best of us.”
Carlson was an aficionado of boxing, and in 1988, he launched a magazine called Illinois Ringside. Carlson’s father had been from Minnesota, and in 1993, Carlson authored a 64-page book, “A Historical Album of Minnesota,” which was part of a series of illustrated accounts of all 50 states.
Carlson never retired. Outside of work, he enjoyed writing songs, playing the guitar, penning poetry and following the Chicago Cubs, his wife said.
In addition to his wife, Carlson is survived by a son, Michael, who co-hosts a popular theme park-oriented podcast, “The Ride”; a daughter, Katie; one granddaughter; and two sisters, Ann Miller and Leslie Carlson.
Services are private.
Bob Goldsborough is a freelance reporter.
