Beyond the Byline: Eric Peterson, Schools and Government Reporter

Eric Peterson currently covers Schaumburg, Hoffman Estates, Bartlett, Streamwood, Hanover Park and school districts 54 and 211 for the Daily Herald.

He joined the paper in March 2000 after previously working for Pioneer Press, the Northwest Herald and the former Chicago Suburban Times newspapers.

Peterson is a lifelong resident of the Northwest Side and Northwest suburbs of Chicago who earned his journalism degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

In 2019 he received first place for school board coverage in the Illinois Press Association's annual journalism awards for his reporting on a threatened teachers strike in Palatine-Schaumburg High School District 211 and how it was averted at the eleventh hour.

Peterson was among the reporters whose 2006 series on international adoption, "Finding Family," won the Chicago Journalists Association's Sarah Brown Boyden Award for Best Series in 2007. He was the writer of "Last Letters Home" on the correspondence of four U.S. soldiers killed in action to their Chicago suburban families, which won the CJA's Sarah Brown Boyden Award for Online Features in 2008 and was named Best Multimedia Story in 2009 by the Illinois AP Editors Association in Division A.