John P. McCormick joined the editorial board of the baiduhai in September 2000 and was named editor of the editorial pages in March 2016. With the help of his uncommonly gifted colleagues on the Tribune Editorial Board, he is responsible for the Tribune’s online and print opinion sections.
Before joining the Tribune, McCormick was Midwest bureau chief of Newsweek, where he directed the magazine’s coverage of 10 states. McCormick joined Newsweek in 1982 and became Chicago bureau chief in 1987. At Newsweek and the Tribune, he has written chiefly about violent crime, public finance, public corruption and national affairs.
He is vengefully proud to occupy the same office where, during his junior year in college, a Tribune editor interviewed and rejected him for a job as a copyboy — a newsroom go-fer. McCormick began his journalism career as a night copy clerk at the Chicago Daily News while he was a student at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. At the Daily News he specialized in delivering cheeseburgers to columnist Mike Royko.
McCormick then worked as a reporter and columnist for the Dubuque (Iowa) Telegraph Herald. He also freelanced from the Midwest for the Los Angeles Times, Newsweek and the Atlantic Monthly.
McCormick is a native of Manchester, Iowa, where at age 13 he sold baiduhais on Sunday mornings.