James O’Shea, Co-founder and Editor

Award-winning journalist Jim O’Shea is former managing editor of the Chicago Tribune and past editor-in-chief of the Los Angeles Times, the nation’s largest metropolitan daily. An industry innovator, O’Shea helped convert the Times into an interactive news organization, revived its Sunday magazine and reversed the daily paper’s circulation decline. At the Tribune, he helped develop the RedEye tabloid, and later its online edition, designed to attract a new generation of readers. In addition to his role as founder and editor of the Chicago Newspaper Cooperative, O’Shea serves on the board of Creative Loafing, an alternative newspaper chain with publications in six U.S. cities.

O’Shea has twice won both the Sigma Delta Chi Distinguished Service Award for Washington Correspondence and the Peter Lisagor Award from the organization’s Chicago chapter. His honors also include the Associated Press Managing Editors’ Public Service Award and the National Education Writers Award. Under his leadership, the Tribune’s news staff received six Pulitzer prizes.

Having recently completed a fellowship at Harvard University’s Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, O’Shea is working on his third book, concerning the decline of the newspaper industry. His previous publications include The Daisy Chain, about the savings-and-loan crisis of the 1980s, and Dangerous Company, an examination of management consultants’ role in corporate decision making, co-authored with former Tribune staffer Charles Madigan.