Jim Daley

I am an investigative journalist from Chicago, where I cover government, public safety, and movement organizing. Currently, I'm the investigations editor at South Side Weekly.

During the 2023 Chicago municipal election, I was the news editor at The TRiiBE. I led the newsroom's investigations and political coverage, and broke multiple stories about the candidates and the race. From January 2022 to 2023, I was the news editor at the Chicago Reader. I oversaw more than a dozen investigations, started the first column in a Chicago newspaper by an incarcerated writer, and produced the first-ever voter guide to Police District Council races.

Before that, I was South Side Weekly's politics editor for nearly three years. Our June 2020 issue, Chicago Reacts to the Killing of George Floyd, won a Peter Lisagor award for best special news section. My investigation of how the Chicago police used the city's gun-violence prevention center and CPD's press office to surveil political protesters won the 2021 Lisagor for best in-depth reporting in a community newspaper.

My work has also appeared in Block Club Chicago, Slate, Scientific American, The Trace, In These Times, Al Jazeera, Smithsonian Magazine, and elsewhere.

Before becoming a journalist, I worked in kitchens, bookstores, bars, restaurants, retail shops, painting crews, science laboratories, and (briefly) a planetarium.