Shamus Toomey is Managing Editor of DNAinfo.com Chicago.
He oversees DNAinfo.com's staff of Chicago reporters and editors, tackling the news of the city's many diverse neighborhoods.
Shamus comes to DNAinfo.com from the Chicago Sun-Times, where he was the assistant managing editor/metro, overseeing the newspaper's news coverage. He was at the Sun-Times from 2003 until 2012, starting as a general assignment reporter and becoming its metro editor in 2009. He supervised the team that won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting. That team included Mark Konkol, now DNAinfo.com Chicago's writer-at-large.
Shamus previously worked as a reporter for the Daily Herald, covering Chicago and Chicago's northwest suburbs from 1997 until 2003. Before that, he was a cub reporter and editor at the now-defunct City News Bureau of Chicago, the throwback training ground for reporters that boasted such alums as Kurt Vonnegut, Mike Royko, Seymour Hersh and Charles MacArthur, who went on to co-write the play "The Front Page."
He was born and raised in Evanston, and still won't shut up about how great a school Evanston Township High is. He studied journalism at Syracuse University, where it snowed almost every day. He considers himself a national champion despite being long gone by the time Carmelo Anthony helped Syracuse win a basketball championship in 2003.
Fun fact: Shamus has an uncanny success rate on those arcade Skill Crane games, and has a houseful of cheap stuffed animals to prove it.