James E. O’shea

James O’Shea recently relocated to North Carolina from Chicago. He works as an independent author, editor and journalist. He was most recently 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 foreign news staff. 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 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. 

O’Shea is also a contributor to the National Book Review.   

Colleagues

Bill Parker is an editor and manager with long experience in written and visual communication in print and digital media. He was an editor at the Chicago Tribune for more than 30 years. For almost two decades, he was a key member of the team that shaped Page One of the newspaper. He served as Page One news editor, senior news editor and eventually associate managing editor for news editing. Parker spent several years as the Tribune’s chief picture editor and later as the associate managing editor for photography. He also worked as Perspective editor and sports news editor. He led several cross-disciplinary teams, including one that expanded the paper’s digital storytelling skills on three CD-ROMs, another that established a new book-publishing process, a third that redesigned the newspaper, and a fourth that reviewed management practices. He won several internal and external awards for design, editing and leadership. 

After leaving the Tribune, Parker co-founded and served as deputy editor of the Chicago News Cooperative, a non-profit that launched a web site and other digital products and provided Chicago news twice a week to the New York Times. He was also an editor at AnswersMedia, where he led a team that conceptualized and produced a series of 18 compact books on wellness and health care. He was the editorial director of the CityXones local news platform. He is the director of the Out of Eden-Chicago nonprofit. Before joining the Tribune, Parker worked as a sportswriter, reporter and editor at the Democrat and Chronicle in his hometown of Rochester, N.Y.