James E. O’shea

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James O’Shea works as an independent author, editor and journalist. In July of 2022 he was named chairman of the board of the Middle East Broadcasting Networks (MBN). He was also CEO of CityXones, an innovative news platform designed to revive the fortunes of local journalism in America.

O’Shea is a veteran newsman with broad and deep experience in journalism. He was editor and executive vice president of the Los Angeles Times and managing editor of the Chicago Tribune, where he spent many years overseeing the Tribune’s national/foreign news and investigative reporting staffs. He is the author of three books including The Deal From Hell, a narrative about the fatal merger of Times Mirror and the Tribune companies. In detailing how the combined company fell into the hands of Sam Zell, a Chicago real estate mogul, and then into bankruptcy, the book covered the forces that derailed the newspaper industry. 

O’Shea also co-founded the Chicago News Cooperative, a digital news start-up that produced Chicago news pages twice a week for the New York Times. He was the Howard R. March Visiting Professor of Journalism at the University of Michigan for the 2013/14 academic year. In 2009, O’Shea was a fellow at the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, a Harvard University research center that explores the intersection and impact of media, politics and public policy in theory and practice. O’Shea is also a contributor to the National Book Review. 

O’Shea serves on numerous boards of directors, including his most recent appointment to the board of the Middle East Broadcasting Networks (MBN), which serves an audience of 27.5 million in 22 counties across the Middle East and North Africa. The MBN is financed by the U.S. government through a grant from the U.S. Agency for Global Media, an independent federal agency designed to provide objective journalism and protect journalists from political influence.