Jesús Del Toro (@JesusDelToro) is an award winning senior media executive, journalist, poet, and thinker with thorough experience in team leadership, media, business management, cultural collaborations, grant development, external relations, and creative endeavors. He is passionate about media, culture, and community dialogue and advancement.
Del Toro is the director of La Raza newspaper in Chicago and Director of Grants Development for Impremedia, publisher of the newspapers La Opinión (LA) and El Diario (NY).
He holds a PhD in journalism from the Complutense University of Madrid and a bachelor’s degree in communication from the Ibero-American University in Mexico City. He was a fellow of the Northwestern University Medill Media Innovation and Leadership Academy and of the NEA Journalism Institute in Classical Music at Columbia University.
For his commitment to community, he was named “Master of Media” by Editor & Publisher magazine and “Latino Editor of the Year” by the National Association of Hispanic Publications (NAHP). As a representative of the Chicago Independent Media Alliance, the Governor of Illinois appointed him to the Local Journalism Task Force, a group dedicated to analyzing and proposing policy in support of local news media. He was the director of Rumbo newspaper in Texas, a columnist for Yahoo!, and in Mexico, editorial director of Ciberoamerica.com, and editorialist for the Mexican newspaper La Jornada.
His projects have received grants from foundations and programs such as Press Forward Chicago, Press Forward national, the Chicago Community Trust, the Field Foundation, the Lenfest Institute, and the Google News Initiative.
He is currently the VP of Marketing on the Executive Board of NAHP, a member of the Board of Directors of Public Narrative, and a member of the Advisory Board of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra Latino Alliance.
Del Toro is the author of the poetry books ‘Pequeñanatomía’ and ‘Variaciones de la Creación’, the music journalism book ‘Silvestre Revueltas del otro lado’, and the bilingual civic education book ‘40 Key of Democracy in the USA’. He is the editor and co-author of the bilingual journalism books ‘Clamor Chicago’ (Chicago, 2021) and ‘Barrio y paz/Neighborhood and Peace’, and editor of the bilingual book ‘Guide to Voting and Encouraging Voting in the USA’. He was the executive producer of the online concert ‘Sweet and Sacred Child: Ancient Christmas Songs’.
Del Toro has participated in programs such as the Northwestern University Medill Local News Accelerator, the Local Media Association Lab for Funding Journalism, the Advancing Democracy fellowship, the Solutions Journalism Revenue Accelerator, and the Facebook Sustainability Accelerator. Also, he is or has been part of local and national collaborative projects such as the Chicago Independent Media Alliance, Latido Beat, the Latino Local News Collaborative, the PN/Northwestern University Community, Media & Research Partnership Task Force, Solving for Chicago, and Lens on Lightfoot.
linkedin.com/in/jesusdeltoroh/
jdeltoro at yahoo.com
Jesús Del Toro 