Michael Jurusik, You Have Some Explaining To Do

Why does Maywood's attorney insist that my newspaper lacks sufficient legal standing when he knows (or at least ought to know) it doesn't?

Maywood’s attorney, Michael Jurusik, of Klein, Thorpe & Jenkins, at a village board meeting in 2021. | File

Author’s Note: While this piece is addressed to one person in particular, I’m sharing it with readers of this Substack, as well. I want to get multiple perspectives on what may be happening here. If anyone reading has some background in municipal law or local government and would like to chime in on what you think is going on, feel free to email me (michael@wearejohnwilk.com).

The news industry is in turmoil, with even billionaire-funded major dailies like the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post undergoing massive job cuts. Nowadays, whole counties are lucky to have a single crime reporter. According to Northwestern University’s Local News Initiative, 204 counties in the U.S. have no newspaper, digital news site, or public radio newsroom and another 228 counties are at “substantial risk of becoming news deserts in coming years.” 

Maywood is fortunate because the village has a local media platform that actually cares enough to report on what’s happening in town with some regularity. Village Free Press isn’t close to what suburbs like Maywood need, because there’s only so much a single person (myself) who functions as reporter, editor, photographer and publisher can cover. But it does, in fact, at least partially fill a dire need. 

Maintaining a weekly newspaper, however small, is a next-to-impossible burden, but the load is lighter with community support and we’re exploring ways to pursue significant sources of funding that will allow us to thrive. One of the easiest ways that communities can support the newspaper is by paying to place legal advertisements with that local newspaper. 

And yet, Maywood hasn’t placed a legal advertisement with Village Free Press since 2021, when Mayor Nathaniel George Booker was elected. Instead, the village has been paying either the Chicago Sun-Times or the Chicago Tribune — both newspapers that don’t regularly cover Maywood. 

What’s more, the village has premised its decision to avoid publishing legals with VFP on the legal opinion of its attorney, Michael Jurusik, of the law firm Klein, Thorpe & Jenkins, who has claimed since 2018 that VFP somehow does not make the cut to be a fully legal newspaper like the Sun-Times or Tribune. 

That is false. 

Between 2019 and 2021, Jurusik’s false claim prompted Maywood officials to establish the befuddling practice of publishing the very same legal notice with the Sun-Times or Tribune whenever they published a notice with VFP, as if to indicate that the village needed insurance lest VFP’s ‘lesser legal’ status put the village at risk of having their notices declared “null and void.” This meant that Maywood was unnecessarily (and absurdly) paying double every time it published a notice in VFP. 

Again, VFP has the very same authority to publish legal notices as the Sun-Times or Tribune. In fact, VFP is the only legal newspaper in the state with a point of publication in Maywood. In the words of Don Craven, the general counsel and president/CEO of the Illinois Press Association, of which VFP is a dues-paying member: “There is no question that your publication is eligible to run public notices in Illinois … Maywood is your chosen place of publication, and that choice is reflected in your registration with Public Notice Illinois.”

When a new mayor was elected in 2021, he hired a village manager who decided, rightly, that it didn’t make sense to pay double for one legal notice so she simply made the directive to stop placing legals with VFP. Wrongly, she made the decision without even notifying me or anyone else at VFP, who could’ve told her the truth, which is that the village can publish notices with VFP alone, without the help of one of those two daily newspapers. I could have directed her to all kinds of taxing bodies that publish all manner of legal notices with VFP and VFP alone. And if cost were an issue, we would have gladly beat the price of those two bigger competitors. We would have provided our circulation information and spelled out our publication schedule and deadlines. 

After the former manager, Chasity Wells-Armstrong, was fired after months of conflict with Mayor Booker (a story that only VFP covered with regularity and which other publications like Kankakee’s Daily Journal picked up only after learning from us), the decision she made about legal placements did not change — not even after a board trustee requested late last year that the village publish a tax hearing notice with VFP. 

Again, the main justification for Maywood not placing legal advertising with VFP under Mayor Booker and for paying double the amount when the village was placing legal ads with VFP under Mayor Edwenna Perkins was based on false information about our legal status that Michael Jurusik was feeding (and continues to feed) village officials. 

I haven’t said much about this and did not know that the issue would come up last year, but I’ve been forced to respond to protect my professional reputation and the reputation of my newspaper. It’s one thing for a municipality to avoid doing business with the only newspaper that covers the town. It’s another thing to base that decision on a falsehood about the legal status of your community’s lone legal newspaper — one owned by someone who grew up in Maywood no less.  

On Jan. 24, I emailed Jurusik, Booker and the village manager, Jim Krischke, requesting that they have Jurusik clarify the legal basis for questioning the legality of my newspaper. They have yet to provide any clarification, which is what prompted me to write this missive.  

So, I’m asking again. Jurusik, please spell out the reason for why you have been questioning the legal status of Village Free Press and telling Maywood officials that it’s somehow risky and hazardous to place public notices with my newspaper, despite my newspaper having the same legal status as the Sun-Times or the Tribune. What is your legal reasoning? I know in the past, you’ve vaguely mentioned legal precedent (old court cases). But why is there a need to cite legal precedent when a newspaper’s legality is pretty cut and dry. 

As a municipal attorney, you’re no doubt aware of the state statute governing public notices and I’ve forwarded you the opinion of Don Craven, one of the state’s top experts on legal newspapers. He knows my newspaper is a legal publication that doesn’t need to be hand-held by either the Sun-Times or the Tribune. 

I’m a Black journalist and newspaper publisher under 40 years old. I’ve gotten used to people second-guessing me and questioning my credibility. But that doesn’t mean that I have to sit down and take this kind of treatment.