We’re excited to announce that Lynn Sweet, the Chicago Sun-Times’ longtime Washington bureau chief, has accepted an innovative new role creating and experimenting with audience-focused journalism across Chicago Public Media. Check out her TikTok introducing the new series here.
This move will leverage Lynn’s extensive experience covering Washington, D.C., Illinois and Chicago politics to create accessible, explanatory journalism across all platforms, formats and mediums – particularly in a moment when understanding the impact of decisions made in Washington for Chicago and Illinois feels more urgent than ever.
From previous experiments, we know our audiences are seeking more knowledgeable, quick explainers to help them understand how our government works, why different news moments are happening and how we got here.
With her Chicago roots, plain speaking style and her decades of experience covering politics for the Sun-Times in DC, Lynn is the right person – and personality – to break down political news for Chicago area audiences on TikTok, newsletters and other platforms. Lynn will bring decades of institutional knowledge and a distinctive perspective to our work on these platforms, inviting new audiences to engage with the news from a trusted source.
Lynn will move from the politics team to our audience team for her new role, which aims to help us achieve sustainability in several ways. The pilot experiments will aim to grow audience awareness, loyalty and trust. She will also work with Chicago Public Media’s membership, marketing and development teams. And she will continue to moderate high-profile conversations at company and community events and appear on national and local TV/radio shows as an analyst and expert on Chicago and Washington.
Lynn has a master’s degree from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism and received her undergraduate degree from the University of California at Berkeley. She also studied at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is a former fellow at Harvard University’s Institute of Politics and the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics. Lynn has been inducted into Northwestern University’s Medill Hall of Achievement and was named by Washingtonian magazine as one of the capital’s “50 Top Journalists.”
This change is part of a larger editorial strategy stemming from a major restructuring of our news organization in May. Four editors and 14 reporters across the Sun-Times and WBEZ have joined a combined Chicago Public Media politics, government and safety team, led by senior editors Alex Rodriguez and Angela Rozas O’Toole.
Tony Arnold has been named state and federal politics editor. Patrick Smith is now the public safety editor. Tina Sfondeles will be our new national political reporter, covering the Illinois congressional delegation, the impact of federal politics on Illinois and the Chicago area, and the impact of state politicians on national politics. Tina is a self-described Sun-Times baby, who started her career at the newspaper in 2007 and rose in the ranks from prep sports writer and general assignment reporter to chief political reporter. We welcomed her back to Chicago Public Media in 2022 after a two-year stint covering the White House for Business Insider and Politico in Washington, D.C.
The powerhouse team also includes the following reporters, who are aiming to provide the best, most distinctive and useful coverage of these topics for our region: Mitch Armentrout, Alex Degman, Robert Herguth, Mawa Iqbal, Frank Main, Dave McKinney, Anna Savchenko, Tom Schuba, Jon Seidel, Sophie Sherry, Fran Spielman, Neil Steinberg and Mariah Woelfel.
