Brian Timpone

Onetime TV reporter-turned-entrepreneur; co-founder and chief executive of Journatic LLC. Journatic currently employs about 100 writers based in the Philippines, Eastern Europe, Russia, Brazil and Africa. Filipinos working for the company earn 35 to 40 cents a story. The company has deals with Newsday, the Chicago Tribune, the San Francisco Chronicle and the Houston Chronicle, among other newspapers. Journatic plans to expand its work for dailies and eventually produce 100,000 stories a week. Attended Marian Catholic High School in Chicago Heights and graduated with a journalism degree from the University of Missouri in 1995. His first journalism job after college was with a CBS affiliate in northern Minnesota. Later that year, he returned to Illinois to cover state government. In 1997 he became a $44,000-a-year spokesman for then-Illinois House Minority Leader Lee Daniels, R-Elmhurst. By early 1999, Timpone was a content executive at Zacks Investment Research in Chicago, a provider of financial data and research.Timpone started BlockShopper.com in 2006, the forerunner to Journatic. It published real estate research and news, including property purchases by celebrities and business executives.