William Gaines (professor)

William Chester Gaines (November 1, 1933 – July 20, 2016) was an American journalist and professor of journalism. Gaines was a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter for the Chicago Tribune. He retired from the paper in 2001 and taught in the Department of Journalism at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign until his retirement and designation as an emeritus faculty member in 2007. He died July 20, 2016 at the age of 82.

Gaines earned a bachelor's degree in broadcasting at Butler University in 1956. He served two years in the United States Army working for Armed Forces Radio in Germany. In 1963, he became a reporter for the Chicago Tribune, and then became an investigative reporter in 1974. From 1975 to 1999, Gaines taught an investigative reporting course each semester at Columbia College in Chicago. He was named to the Knight Chair in Journalism at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2001, a post he held until he retired in 2007.

Gaines' first Pulitzer Prize came in 1976 as a member of an investigative team at the Tribune looking into unsafe medical practices at some Chicago hospitals.

In 1988, Gaines and colleagues Dean Baquet and Ann Marie Lipinski won the Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting for a series on the self-interest and waste that plagued the Chicago City Council.

Gaines was nominated in 1979 for a series about the problems of the elderly. Gaines and David Jackson were nominated in 1996 for stories that probed questionable business dealings of the Nation of Islam.

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