In a farewell column this week, new Chicago Reader editor Mara Shalhoup said goodbye to her now-former publication, Creative Loafing (Atlanta), which she had worked at since 2000:

I had a consistently satisfying love affair with Atlanta, and an identity that for the past decade has been happily intertwined with this newspaper. If someone were to have told me several months back that I’d be leaving the city I’ve long championed, a job that never ceased to challenge and fulfill me, and people I admire and adore, I’d have been stunned.

Shalhoup, who started at the Reader on Monday, says of her departure from Creative Loafing, “I’m fortunate to be leaving at a time when that spirit of rebirth, and the publication that has risen out of it, remains strong.”