Monroe Anderson is a 35-year veteran Chicago journalist. A published author, he has worked for major magazines, newspapers, and television and, in recent years, become a cyber columnist. He has also served as the press secretary to the Mayor of Chicago.
A contributor to Huffingtonpost.com, Anderson is a member of the Trotter Group, a collective of African American columnists representing newspapers from coast-to-coast, and of the AfroSpear, an international group of black bloggers. He has also been a contributor to Ebonyjet.com.
In 2007, Anderson taught the MBA 590 class in business presentation in the spring semester at the University of Illinois Chicago. He is currently an adjunct journalism professor at Columbia College Chicago. Anderson was selected by The Kaiser Family Foundation Traveling Media Seminar to tour South Africa during the summer of 2007. He and five other journalists, from the U.S. and the U.K. traveled throughout South Africa for nine days while participating in an in-depth study of the HIV/AIDS epidemic.
From February 2006 until July of 2007, he was a freelance op-ed page columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times. His political commentary ran every Sunday in the newspaper’s “Controversy” section.
Anderson was the editor of Savoy Magazine, until the national publication experienced financial problems in late 2005. Before taking the helm of Savoy in November 2004, he was the editor of N’DIGO, a Chicago weekly publication that has the nation’s largest African-American newspaper circulation.
As a career journalist for more than three decades, Anderson has worked for some of America’s best-known media corporations—Dow Jones, Johnson Publishing Company, the Tribune Company, Post-Newsweek and Viacom. In 1988-89, he had a stint in municipal government, serving as Press Secretary for Chicago Mayor Eugene Sawyer and running the press office.
Anderson is a co-author of the non-fiction book, Brothers, which was published by William Morrow & Company in the spring of 1988. He is also a contributing author to Restoration 1989: Chicago Elects a New Daley, a book detailing the 1989 Chicago mayoral election, published by Lyceum Books in the fall of 1991. Anderson’s chapter is entitled, “The Sawyer Saga: A Journalist, Who Just Happened to be the Mayor’s Press Secretary, Speaks.”
In his 10 years at the Tribune, Anderson worked as a city hall reporter; participated on four award-winning investigative series; worked as a general assignment reporter; did police and court beat reporting; and periodically wrote concert and record reviews.
From September 1983 until January 1985, he wrote a signed political column that appeared every Friday on the Chicago Tribune’s op-ed page. The column was transmitted weekly by the Knight-Ridder/New York Daily News/Tribune wire service, where it was available to some 130 newspapers.
Anderson has also been a commentator on 848, a public affairs program on WBEZ-FM, Chicago’s NPR station. He is on the boards of Arts Alliance Illinois, Keep Chicago Beautiful and Gilda’s Club. Anderson is a past board director of the National Association of Black Journalists and has served as an officer of the Chicago Association of Black Journalists.
During his career as a print journalist, Anderson appeared on the “Today” and “Donahue” shows and was a regular panelist on the “Chicago Week in Review” on WTTW-TV, the local PBS station.
Monroe Anderson made scores of appearances on other local television and radio programs and lectured at a number of colleges and universities including DePaul University, Indiana University, Northwestern University, the University of Illinois, and Iowa State University.
He earned a B.A. degree from Indiana University’s School of Journalism in Bloomington in 1970, with a double major in journalism and English Literature. He is married to the artist, Joyce Owens. They have two sons, Scott and Kyle.
January 2010
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