I did promise to update everyone, didn't I?

For those of you who haven't seen my posts on Facebook and/or Twitter, on Friday, March 30, I got a check for the first two weeks of March. Not the month of February, or the two weeks of March I invoiced for a day before I wrote the last post on the matter. Which was... random, but that did bring the ( Read more... )

Back on Tuesday, October 31, Robert Feder reported that Linze Rice, DNAinfo Chicago's reporter for Edgewater, Rogers Park and West Ridge, left the company. I immediately went to check the site's careers page. Her leaving the company, I reasoned, created an opening, and an opportunity to have a full-time journalism job covering a neighborhood where ( Read more... )

I am spending the next 1.5 days in Ottawa, the capital city of Canada, with my mom. My mom's friend natasha-kob has been playing host and showing us around. Quite how I got there and how this whole thing came about deserves a separate post (though those of you who follow me on Twitter and Facebook may at least have a general idea). But what I do want to write ( Read more... )

I imagine that, when most people hear about Chicago shootings, the last thing they notice is the location. Not unless it's in neighborhoods where shootings don't usually happen. But ever since my days writing for Chicago Flame, I've been all over the city, including some places that are, well, less safe than others. So when I hear about, say, a ( Read more... )

As I’ve mentioned before, I started writing for the Gazette, a monthly newspaper covering a lot of the same territory as Chicago Journal did, back in January. The article I wrote back then didn’t make it into the February issue, but it was published in the March one. The article was about the program for deaf students at a Near West Side’ Children ( Read more... )

Update (03.01.2017): I've been told, by a reliable source, that the change was temporary for the last two issues of the year, and that it would go back to... well, I guess you can say go back to normal this Wednesday. Something about this whole thing still makes me feel uneasy, but for the time being, at least, false alarm ( Read more... )

I was cleaning out my Firefox tabs when I realized that I never got around to writing about the September 28 "Heart of the Hood" column about something that seemed tailor-made to piss hettie_lz off ( Read more... )

When I was writing my final article for the final issue of the Chicago Journal, I mentioned that it wasn't the first publication to bear it's name, and that it wouldn't be the last.

To make a long story shorter, the first Chicago Journal (also known, at various times, as the Chicago Daily Journal and the Chicago Evening Journal) was one of the ( Read more... )

Since January 13, writer Thomas J. O’Gorman has been been writing a gossip/society column for Skyline community newspaper. He took over the beat after Ann Gerber, Chicago’s longest-running gossip columnist, retired late last year.

I said that there is never going to be anyone quite like Ann Gerber, and, to his credit, Thomas O’Gorman doesn’t try ( Read more... )

Back on January 9, Illinois State Representatives La Shawn Ford (D-8) and Mary Flowers (D-31) invited residents of Chicago West Side - and beyond - to attend a town hall event about a law that would allow Chicagoans to recall their mayors.

Well, to recall Rahm Emanuel specifically, but the law would apply to every mayor.

It was something that ( Read more... )