Previously, Kim worked for eight years at the Chicago Sun-Times, and five years for the Oakland Tribune and its sister newspapers in the San Francisco Bay Area. Kim emigrated from Busan, Korea, to the United States at age 7. He graduated from the University of Illinois in 1997 with a degree from the school of communications. In 2011, Kim was part of a three-person team awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting (he took pictures, and the other two wrote stories). Kim likes baseball, noodles/pastas and big, empty spaces. His two superpower fantasies are to fly and turn invisible, but not at the same time.