Alden Loury

Alden serves as the data projects editor for WBEZ and leads a team of data journalists collaborating with the newsrooms of both WBEZ and the Chicago Sun-Times for enterprise stories and longer-term projects. In that role, he leads projects, analyzes data, creates visualizations, and edits stories. Alden also writes a monthly column for the Chicago Sun-Times.

Alden joined WBEZ in July 2018 and served as senior editor of the race, class and communities desk, which provides enterprise reporting on those topics as well as daily reporting on housing, immigration and employment. He switched over to the data team in October 2022.

Previously, Alden served as the director of research and evaluation for the Metropolitan Planning Council for two years where he examined and wrote about population loss, demographic shifts, job trends and racial segregation.

Prior to joining MPC, Alden served as an investigator and later as a policy analyst for the Better Government Association. In more than four years at the BGA, Alden documented abuses with legislative scholarships, campaign finance expenditures and ward remapping and later analyzed data and lobbied for reforms to increase government transparency, efficiency and accountability.

Prior to joining the BGA, Alden spent 12 years at The Chicago Reporter, initially as a reporter, then senior editor and finally as publisher. He authored, edited or provided research for more than 50 investigative projects examining the impact of race and class in drug sentencing, jury verdicts, jury selection, lottery ticket sales, fatal police shootings and subprime mortgage lending, among other topics.

Alden has discussed his work on ABC7, CBS2, CNN, FOX32, NBC5, WBEZ, WGN-TV, and WTTW Chicago Tonight. His research has appeared in The Chicago Defender, The Chicago Reporter, Chicago Sun-Times, Chicago Tribune, Crain’s Chicago Business, Forbes, Los Angeles Times, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.

Alden is a Chicago native who grew up in the LeClaire Courts public housing development and later the Auburn Gresham community on the city’s South Side.