Ted Cox circled the city working for Star Publications, the Daily Southtown and the Daily Herald before finally landing downtown to cover City Hall and politics for DNAinfo Chicago. He has lived in the city for 30 years and in the Chicago area from the age of 8.

An award-winning columnist, critic, news reporter and sportswriter, Cox has covered everything from tax-increment-financing districts, media ownership consolidation and the first Blagojevich trial to the Jordan-era Bulls, Steppenwolf Theatre and Hubbard Street Dance Chicago.

For 25 years, Cox wrote "The Sports Section" for the Chicago Reader; a collection of those columns, "1,001 Days in the Bleachers: A Quarter Century of Chicago Sports," will be published in March by Northwestern University Press. During that time, his straight gigs included writing "rip & read" broadcast news at United Press International; features copy editor, features writer and film critic at the Southtown; and TV/radio columnist at the Herald, where in the last two years he served as the paper's "man downtown," covering everything from Mayor Daley to Lollapalooza.

Cox has also written several children's book on sports and music figures such as Frank Thomas and Whitney Houston. He is a graduate of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He believes that, the Bears to the contrary, politics is actually the city's most popular sport.

Fun fact: Cox has taken part in The Village Voice's annual Pazz & Jop poll of music critics since 1983.