Chicago Reader

Mondo Times editors    Boulder, Colorado USA

Posted at 3:26pm on Tuesday, November 17th, 2009

Veteran Chicago journalist James C. Warren has been named the president and publisher of the Chicago Reader, effective November 2, 2009. The announcement was made on October 27 by Richard W. Gilbert, interim CEO of Creative Loafing, Inc., the parent company of The Reader.

Warren, 56, was co-managing editor of the Chicago Tribune and before that the Tribune’s Washington bureau chief. He has also been a regular contributor to several cable news networks and is currently a political analyst for MSNBC.

Warren said: “If I bought into much conventional wisdom concerning high-quality print journalism, I’d be entering the fields of clean energy solar panels or medical robots. But I don’t. Rather, I believe The Reader can be an even greater success if it is provocative, makes those in power squirm and yet is willing to entertain and have fun. I hope I can be of help in renewing and reinventing the print version and finding new audiences on the web. We can win. I can't wait.”

Originally from New York City, Warren began his journalism career in the mid-1970s working as a reporter for the Newark Star-Ledger. In 1977, he joined the financial section of the Chicago Sun-Times, where he worked as a business reporter, a general assignment reporter, a legal affairs reporter and a labor reporter.

In mid-December 1993, Warren was chosen to become the Tribune's Washington, D.C., bureau chief. Almost immediately after arriving in town, he attracted attention by exposing the clubby ways of the star journalists in Washington. Warren in particular targeted broadcast journalists who were paid to give speeches to the organizations that they covered. In a feature he dubbed “Cokie Watch”, Warren saved his heaviest vitriol for Cokie Roberts, whose speechifying Warren tracked regularly in his weekly column. Warren himself wound up on TV for three years while living and working in D.C. From 1995 until 1998, he was a regular panelist on CNN's political talk show “Capital Gang Sunday”.

Warren and his wife live in Chicago’s West Graceland neighborhood and has two sons, Blair, 5, and Eliot, five months.

Warren will assume the top post at The Reader, which has been vacant since July. The former publisher was Kirk MacDonald, who was also chief operating officer of Creative Loafing Inc. prior to the recent ownership change.

The Chicago Reader’s weekly printed circulation of 100,000 copies is distributed free each Wednesday/Thursday to more than 1,850 locations in Chicago and select suburbs. The Reader website has over 750,000 weekly page views.

Eric Kallgren    Boulder Colorado USA

Posted at 1:19pm on Monday, June 1st, 2009

The Chicago Reader called the Huffington Post for "Grand Theft HuffPo" in December 2008, after HuffPo was caught republishing Reader editorial:

"They're still taking other people's content, in my non-expert but reasonably well-informed opinion well outside the bounds of fair use—so that they can get more pageviews and SEO advantages for themselves by taking the entirety of other people's work. They're taking all of it. Real people — my colleagues — wrote those.

...You want to do a post that says, "According to Jessica Hopper, Bon Iver rules, check 'em out, go here for the info," fine. But taking an entire concert preview is bush league."