About Chicago Civic Media

We're a media group. Small. Big ideas. Working mostly in Chicago since the late 1980's.

These days we invent mainstream media formats and campaigns and toss them out for media to tweak and deploy. We like to partner with institutions and other media Chicago media. A few of our old partnerships are here and here and here.

Our work is of the past. In the present. For Chicago's future. We look to the day when Chicago's media are showing the rest of America's mainstream media how to make good money using their digital-age resources to help America depolarize its politics with issue-centered, citizen-participatory public forums. All this so democracy can work in a digital age.

I'm Steve Sewall, Ph.D., a longtime Chicago educator, CM's creator and a transplant to Chicago from the East Coast via a teaching position (in English) at Northwestern University. In 1980 I founded and for six years directed The Thomas Jefferson Academy, an independent elementary school for 80 students located several blocks north of Wrigley Field.

Over the years CCM has benefitted from the thinking and support of so many people: CPS Interim Superintendent Charles Almo, CPS Superintendent Manford Byrd Jr, Archdiocese Superintendent Mary Brian Costello, Historian Mary J. Herrick, Charles Price, Gordon Berry, Noam Chomsky, William F. Buckley, Brad Cummings, Dennis Byrne, Mayor Richard M. Daley, Chicago historian and author Kenan Heise, Professor Richard Halverson, Senator Dick Durban, former CPS Board Member Martha Jantho, Past Illinois Public Health Director Dr. LaMar Hasbrouck, Ronald Damholt, Harvard Sociology Professor Felton Earls, my gifted nephew Ethan Sewall, Celia Berdes, the 2009 ChicagoWRKS team of six dedicated volunteers plus the invaluable contributions of over a hundred Chicago high school students over the years including Robert "Deacon" Beck, and poet Shannon Phillips. More recently, Chicago entrepreneur Stuart Rothstein has torn apart everything I write so I could put it back together again in ways that hopefully get across to you people.

Again, CCM projects are all archived at our old Google Classic CCM website, along with my CV. Be forewarned, this site is a little like your grandparents' attic, with all kinds of stuff, some useful, some not. But at least they are chronologically organized.