As most of my regular readers know by now, about three weeks ago, I got a more-or-less regular freelance writing gig with Pioneer Press, the chain of weekly suburban newspapers owned by Sun-Times Media (Chicagoland's second-largest newspaper publisher). My old editor at Chicago Journal got a gig with the company mere days after the paper closed, so ( Read more... )

Last week, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel unveiled his budget proposal for year 2013. In theory, the document was merely a list of suggestions that City Council is in no way obligated to follow. But in reality, City Council usually doesn't make anything but minor changes, so, for the purposes of this discussion, we might as well call it the official ( Read more... )

Last week, the Chicago Reader published an article about the efforts of the residents of Wrightwood, a Chicago Southwest Side working-class neighborhood, to keep a pawnshop from moving into their community. It's a pretty interesting piece, and I'd recommend it to anyone interested in Chicago and community development in general.

But what struck me ( Read more... )

This post was originally supposed to go up a week ago. Unfortunately, my job and other commitments got in the way. So today, I tried my best to finish it up before it becomes completely irrelevant.

The Splash is something of a pet project for Timothy Knight, the CEO of Wrapports, a media company that acquired Sun-Times Media newspapers and the ( Read more... )

With the 2010 census results slowly trickling in, we are finally getting some sense of how the population changed in the Windy City over the past ten years. It's something I've been looking forward since... well, since before the census started, really. And so I has very happy to see the Tribune publishing a graphic about the the population changes ( Read more... )