Dan Sinker's profane fictionalized take on our current Elective Majesty made a brief return from the time vortex where was banished a year ago last night. The response was predictably Pavlovian.
@MayorEmanuel Made A Brief Return From The Vortex Last Night
Chicagoist's Top 11 for 2011: @MayorEmanuel
We continue our recaps of the top 11 stories of the year by looking back at the epic f-ing Twitter quest of @MayorEmanuel.
Tweedy and Emanuel Attend @MayorEmanuel Book Release
Tweedy sang Black Eyed Peas songs, and the real Mayor Emanuel signed @mayoremanuel's book, "You are an asshole."
Does @MayorEmanuel Work As A Book?
Dan Sinker has compiled all six months of the twitterstream into The F***ing Epic Quest of @MayorEmanuel, a book which adds bits of context. Is it still funny?
@MayorEmanuel Is Back ... Kind Of
We've noticed a number of folks re-tweeting content purportedly generated from the @MayroEmanuel account, but every time we click through we see that it's still frozen in time with the last tweet on the day of last year's mayoral election. After a bit of poking around we've discovered that the account is in fact sending out tweets and then immediately deleting them, so only folks subscribed to mobile updates to the feed's RSS are seeing them. We're guessing this is a bit of marketing courtesy the man behind @MayorEmanual to drive up conversation and buzz in advance of The F***ing Epic Twitter Quest of @MayorEmanuel, the book collecting all of the @MayorEmanuel tweets.
This Is a Thing: Goose Island "PR" Hits Twitter
If a tree falls in the forest, did it make a sound? And if a news event doesn't have a fake Twitter account created for it, did it really happen? (Josh Simpson and Dan Sinker, what hath thou wrought?)
Humpday Morning Diversion: Stephen Colbert Vs. @MayorEmanuel
Dan Sinker, a.k.a. @MayorEmanuel, stopped by the Colbert Report to parry with Stephen Colbert. Much speculation preceded the appearance (would Colbert act as if he thought real Mayor Rahm Emanuel was the person he was talking to? Would he interview Sinker about everything but the fake Twitter handle?) but the end result was an entertaining back and forth showing Sinker can hold his own IRL.
Rahm, Sinker Meet
Mayor-elect Emanuel and Dan Sinker, author of the "@MayorEmanuel" twitter feed, finally had their face-to-face yesterday on WLS-AM's afternoon drive show with Roe Conn and Richard Roeper. In the process, Emanuel made good on his promise to donate $5,000 to the charity of Sinker's choice, Young Chicago Authors. Causes matched Emanuel's donation, while Conn and Roeper each contributed $1,000 each. Not a bad day for one of Sinker's favored charities.
Six Degrees of @MayorEmanuel
One of the folks who early on divined Dan Sinker's identity as "@mayoremanuel" was Seth Lavin, who put two and two together from a bit.ly link sent out on the Emanuel feed via Sinker's account.
Mayor-Elect Emanuel, Meet @MayorEmanuel.
Two days after outing himself as the author of the MayorEmanuel twitter feed, Dan Sinker will be coming face to face with the man he emulated/parodied/"made fun with" this afternoon.
Meet @MayorEmanuel: The Atlantic Outs "Mayor" Creator
Whether you wanted to know who the brilliant mind behind the MayorEmanuel twitter feed was or not, now we know, thanks to the Atlantic. And that man is none other former Punk Planet-er, creator of CellStories and the Chicago Mayoral Scorecard, and Columbia College journalism teacher, Dan Sinker. As the Atlantic puts it, Sinker "has a heart made out of Chicago and balls of punk rock." Hard to dispute.
New York Times Makes Play On Chicago
While we knew the New York Times was planning a local edition of its paper for the Chicago area, details emerged yesterday about the paper's specific plans. The news for the Chicago-centric paper will be handled by a group called Chicago News Cooperative. The CNC will include former Tribune editor James O'Shea and James Warren; the advisory board will be chaired by journalist Peter Osnos and another Tribune editor, Ann Marie Lipinski, is a board member. The group will receive a bulk of its funding from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation while also receiving assistance from WTTW. In fact, the CNC will start life as a non-profit affiliate of Window to the World Communications which happens to be WTTW's parent company. The Cooperative is also in talks with WBEZ for potential future collaboration. Two pages of Chicago-related news will appear twice a week (Friday and Sunday) in copies of the New York Times distributed in the Chicago area starting November 20.
CellStories Launches
Ever felt like reading a short story on your phone while traversing the city on the El or bus? Given the way so many people make their commutes with their noses in their phones anyway - not to mention the number of services being added to the subway tunnels - it's not at all out of the question. Now you can thanks to CellStories, a new service from Dan Sinker (founding editor of Punk Planet, journalism teacher at Columbia College, and all-around awesome guy). The service sends a new story to your mobile device each day that you can read at your leisure. Sinker sat down with WBEZ to answer a few questions about the new service.

