Nuances of passion sometimes are key to deciding story play

Prominent trials are followed passionately by some people -- but not all.

It was a reasonable enough question for a wife to ask her husband three days before a high school graduation party for their son.

Why?

Why are you on constant watch for this, of all trials? Why must your duties at home revolve around the actions of an unpredictable jury in a complicated inside-politics corruption case? Do people really care that much about Tony Rezko?

It's an issue more easily addressed by a newsperson than a father. I, after all, and the reporters and editors I've been working with have been following this case for years, first waiting weeks and months as rumors swirled that the governor's close friend would be indicted, then watching as the inevitable case made its lumbering, dull way through the court system.

By the time Rezko's trial began, the import and implications of the charges against him -- that he was tampering with the foundations of state government in order to make himself richer and possibly to make the governor more powerful -- were generally acknowledged, if not exactly dinner conversation in every Illinois household. But the imminence of the verdict involving him late last week still begged the question: Do people really care that much?

In a different sense, it's a question that's also emerging this week as we approach the climax of a very different trial at 26th and California streets, a few miles south of the Loop site of the Rezko furor. There, rhythm and blues superstar R. Kelly soon will await a jury's verdict on sex charges that could put him away for years.

Because of Kelly's prominence, the case has been front-page news throughout Chicago periodically for weeks, and when the verdict is read in a week or so, it will reverberate around the world. Even so, reasonable people may well ask their spouses -- or in my case, a middle-aged father may well ask his teenage sons: Do people really care that much?

Ultimately, the answer is the same for Kelly as it is for Rezko: Yes, some people do. In Rezko's case, they are people who closely follow politics and government. In Kelly's, they are legions of music fans. Neither set includes every citizen or newspaper reader, but both involve substantial audiences with genuine passions for their subject.

And, of course, both of them involve issues that affect society at large. Even as I write this, the Rezko case is pulsating beneath talk of impeaching the governor. Kelly's trial, delayed for six years since the charges were originally filed, is about nothing if it is not about how the justice system handles prominent people -- or they it.

In Managing Editor Madeleine Doubek's office the night of the Rezko verdict, four of us editors stared at a variety of front page mock-ups debating how much of the front-page real estate should be devoted to the case. Was it worth stretching across five of the page's six columns? Should the headline be two inches tall? They're the same questions we'll address when Kelly's verdict is read, and again will come the familiar answer: For some people, yes.

Yet, there is another dimension implicit in the notion of "some people." That is "but not all." It's that dimension that led us to settle on a slightly smaller display and not quite so blaring a headline. It's a nuance of passion that is difficult to attain but important in the presentation of a big story.

Not every case that dishevels the life of a newsperson shakes the world of all parents, or newspaper readers. But if yours is one of the worlds that is shaken by a given story, the disheveling, alas, may still be necessary.