Joni Hirsch Blackman

A third-grader once asked Joni Hirsch Blackman what she would have been if she couldn’t have been a journalist. She had no answer. Luckily, she has been a journalist since high school, where she worked on the newspaper and was yearbook editor twice; in college, she worked as a paid reporter for the independent Arizona Daily Wildcat, and ever since. She was a features reporter for the Brazosport (TX) Facts; a broadcast desk writer for the Associated Press in Denver; a city desk and City Hall beat reporter for The Denver Post; a copy editor for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Joni was a longtime freelancer, stringing for Time Magazine for five years and for People Magazine for 9 years in Seattle, Denver and Chicago. The prolific freelancer has contributed to more than a dozen national magazines such as Parenting, Family Life, Child and USA Weekend. She wrote a column, Cul-de-sacs, for the Naperville Sun and the Daily Herald for 12 years, then a column about historic buildings — Building Memories — for another five. She wrote “Downtown Naperville” and “George Clooney: A Biography” in 2008 and 2009 and has been the “Look to the Western Sky” columnist for West Suburban Living Magazine since 2013. In 2014, she was honored to be named to the Arizona Daily Wildcat’s Hall of Fame. Her non-journalistic passion began in 2013 when she became a docent for the Chicago Architecture Foundation, and bubbled over the following year when she became a river docent. The third-generation native Chicagoan who was born in a hospital overlooking Lake Shore Drive most recently wrote “This Used To Be Chicago” for Reedy Press.