Marco Buscaglia
Marco Buscaglia has been writing stories since he was in the second grade at St. Constance School in Chicago. Marco’s inaugural attempt at storytelling, “Bicentennial Nightmare,” was a 41-word piece of historical fiction that was praised for its sparse, Hemmingway-esque approach to detail and plot—and let's not forget the gloriously formed uppercase A's and lowercase b's. “Nightmare,” a madcap retelling of George Washington’s journey down the Potomac River, marked the beginning of Marco's manipulation of the written word, a skill he further developed throughout high school and college. He has been creating content for large and small sums of money since 1991.
Marco began his writing career as a sports columnist for Inside Lincoln Square, a weekly newspaper in Chicago. Marco's exceptional research skills, his unbridled enthusiasm and his ability to reword a press release about a sports-related event at a local bar gave him ironclad stability at the paper. Also, a lifelong friend—a one-time roommate, the best man at Marco's wedding and the godfather to Marco's first child—was the managing editor at Inside Lincoln Square at the time. A few weeks into the job, that editor realized he needed to replace the exiting sports columnist and turned to Marco, the first person he thought of after being told the paper would pay the replacement columnist $10 a week. But that's not important. What is important is that Marco parlayed that freelance gig into a full-time, $14,000-a-year job with the Chicago Suburban Times, where he served as a reporter, then the editor, of the Park Ridge Times-Herald for two years, working with some fantastic fresh-out-of-college reporters who, like himself, were willing to work for $6.73 an hour, which, after a weekly staff meeting each Wednesday, they often spent on beer, Italian sausage and cheese fries at Mr. Beef in Mount Prospect.
Marco learned a lot about reporting and writing his two years with the Park Ridge paper, since he was single-handedly responsible for the paper's local content each week. In addition to covering the city's business community, political maneuverings and occasional crimes, Marco relished the chance to write editorials, create photo pages, write about interesting residents and lay out the paper. After putting the Times-Herald to bed each Tuesday afternoon—usually after an all-nighter on Monday—Marco especially looked forward to the aforementioned Wednesday staff meetings where the editor of each paper would tell their managing editor that they were working on the same two or three stories each week. Marco's weekly contributions were "I'm interviewing a woman who has a piece of the Berlin Wall on display in her yard" and "I'm trying to track down the history of those unique Park Ridge street signs." Still, neither suggestion was as good as "I'm working on a story about a doctor who still makes house calls," which another editor offered up each week. Still, Marco was able to cover some fairly interesting meetings, a brutal library expansion debate, colorful candidates in the aldermanic elections, racial disharmony at a school and more. The short experience cemented Marco's love of local news and made him see the importance of his reclusive publisher's angry advice during an impromptu appearance at a weekly staff meeting, where he marked individual stories in each paper with a giant red X, admonishing the staff to tell him why the story mattered to "regular Joes." He then told his young $6.73-an-hour journalists that they were now required to write "you" in every story, as in "what does this story mean to you, dear reader," thus beginning weeks of stories with sentences like "You won't want to miss next week's Appearance Commission meeting ... " or "You might be paying a lot more in property taxes next year if ... " until he forgot about it and moved on to larger issues, likely how he could staff a newsroom for eight suburban papers with reporters and editors who’d work for $6.72 an hour.
After ignoring a phone message from the Tribune Company in February of 1994, thinking it was a call soliciting a subscription to the Chicago Tribune, which he already read for free each day at his current job—and he was more of a Sun-Times reader, anyway—Marco realized the caller behind the message on his answering machine was referencing a blind ad he had responded to weeks earlier. In May of 1994, after a few interviews over the course of three months, Marco began a nearly 21-year tenure at the Tribune Company, where he worked with dozens of really talented people, made strong friendships and had a two-decade-long string of incredible bosses. Although Marco worked in various roles, he spent the majority of his career with Tribune Media Services, the company's syndication service. Marco initially worked as a reporter and then editor of the company's college news service. He went to the White House during Bill Clinton's first term and interviewed several cabinet members and the president about the newly created AmeriCorps program. He rode that story about as far as he could before becoming a producer on the breaking-news portion of chicagotribune.com when the site first launched in March of 1996. In September of 2001, Marco was part of a team that helped launch a new job-related initiative within Tribune Company, and served as editor of the CareerBuilder page for nearly 13 years, which was part of his role as general manager of Tribune Content Agency's specialty-publications group. After a reorganization of his division in 2014, Marco worked on the Tribune Company's sponsored-content initiative with the newly formed Tribune Brand Publishing. In his redefined role, Marco worked with story sources, advertisers, freelancers, sales representatives and marketing associates on numerous projects that featured effective, compelling and seamless content for clients like Allstate, Macy’s, McDonald’s and others.
Marco left Tribune Content Agency in 2015 and began freelance writing, editing and consulting. Since that time, he has conceptualized, curated and created stories for anyone who was willing to help him pay his electric bill. Marco also lined up his old gig with the Tribune's Sunday career pages, providing his former company and colleagues with stories about the job-search process, career trends and employee profiles. Marco's stories have appeared in the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, the Orlando Sentinel, Red Eye and the Miami Herald, among others. In addition to his work for Tribune Content Agency, he has written stories, edited content and worked in various word-related roles for numerous businesses and associations, including AT&T, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Illinois, PR Newswire, the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, the American Health Information Management Association, Yuppie Puppy, Paylocity and others.
Earlier this year, Marco made a huge oversight involving AI-generated content—an honest mistake for which he took full responsibility and apologized for. He was generating background information for a list about the most anticipated summer books for a special section he was working on and sent the list—which included AI-hallucinated books that didn’t exist—while he was still gathering information. The experience made Marco realize the importance of editorial standards while making it clear that strong, thoughtful processes are just as important as the final product. It strengthened his commitment to accuracy, accountability and the fundamentals of quality content. It also reminded him that any email he might receive at 4 a.m. with a subject line of “This you, jackass?” is usually a harbinger of some really bad news and that he should prepare himself and his family for some dark days ahead. Realizing he can’t just sit around feeling sorry for himself and gaining weight, Marco hopes to use his lessons learned from his AI-induced errors to help others. Moving forward, he’s committed to creating meaningful work that values precision and thoughtful curation.
Marco earned his Bachelor of Science in English from Illinois State University in 1991 and his Master of Arts in Writing from DePaul University in 2009. At DePaul, Marco began working on a collection of semi-autobiographical short stories centered around the park across the street from his childhood house and the group of boys who called it home. After letting it sit for 10 years, Marco began working on "Park 285" once again, and regardless of whether or not it gets published, it has become a wonderful diversion and centering element of his life. Marco's fiction and poetry have run in the Chicago Reader, Druid’s Cave and other publications.
Marco was an adjunct composition instructor at Roosevelt University for about 10 years, where he taught motivated, hard-working students who actively participated in class discussions and welcomed candid advice on their writing. They were nice enough to smile and occasionally laugh when Marco went into a 10-minute schtick about his dead grandmother.
After years of writing thoughts and opinions in small journals, blank pieces of paper, old notebooks, the margins of newspapers, index cards and the back of his hand, Marco began blogging in 2010 and did so for about 20 years. He hopes to get back to it soon. You can check out some of his past and possibly future efforts at online narcissism at butsko.com.
Marco lives in the Andersonville neighborhood of Chicago with his wife Cathy, a special education teacher for the Chicago Public Schools. They have four fully grown children—two daughters and two sons, a dog with a face that looks frighteningly human and an aggressively curious cat.