After four years as editor-in-chief of the Chicago Reader, Mara Shalhoup will take the helm at L.A. Weekly next month:

Shalhoup built her early career on hard news and investigative reporting and editing at Creative Loafing in Atlanta. In her 10 years there she took on challenging assignments: tracking the displacement of thousands of families from public housing, earning the trust of a prostitute turned triple-murderer, and piecing together the definitive story of a drug enterprise/music empire. She became the paper’s top editor in 2010, the same year St. Martin’s Press published BMF: The Rise and Fall of Big Meech and the Black Mafia Family, her book about the Detroit brothers whose $270 million cocaine operation helped launch some of the country’s most successful hip-hop artists.