New management team announced for SouthtownStar
Staff Report August 16, 2012 11:18PM
Joe Biesk
Updated: September 18, 2012 6:28AM
Sun-Times Media on Thursday announced a new management team at the SouthtownStar.
Managing editor Joe Biesk will become the newspaper’s editor, replacing outgoing editor Michelle Holmes, who left the company after completing a yearlong John S. Knight Fellowship at Stanford University. Biesk, 36, had been the paper’s interim editor during her absence.
Meanwhile, John O’Brien, 42, an Oak Lawn native and Brother Rice High School alum, returns from Sun-Times Media, where he had helped coordinate coverage between the Sun-Times and suburban newspapers, to the SouthtownStar as managing editor.
Biesk and O’Brien also take on the same roles at the SouthtownStar’s sister paper, the Herald-News in Joliet.
Biesk joined the SouthtownStar in 2010 as a political reporter after seven years at The Associated Press. He is a graduate of Northern Illinois University and the University of Illinois at Springfield’s Public Affairs Reporting program. He is married and has two children.
O’Brien first joined the Daily Southtown in 1998 after working for five years at the News-Gazette in Champaign. He is a graduate of the University of Notre Dame and the University of Illinois at Springfield’s Public Affairs Reporting program.
The SouthtownStar and The Herald-News are owned by Sun-Times Media.
