Episode 2: The Reformation of Local News and the View From Chicago
When a Chicago news site was abruptly shut down, its journalists didn’t walk away—they built something better. This episode follows Block Club Chicago co-founder Jen Sabella and other community-first innovators redefining what local news can be in Chicago.
In 2017, after the combined newsrooms of hyperlocal startups DNAinfo and Gothamist voted to unionize, the organizations’ billionaire owner, Joe Ricketts, shut them down within a week without attempting to negotiate with the union or seeking a buyer.
In Chicago at DNAinfo, the reporters had built such a loyal audience, they heard immediately from our readers: We would’ve paid you, we would’ve been a member, we would’ve donated. What can we do to get this back?’”
So they continued their work under a different banner – and launched the most successful Kickstarter campaign at the time for local news, founding the nonprofit Block Club Chicago.
“Being in the Neighborhoods Is Really Our Bread and Butter”
Chicago, as it turns out, has become something of an incubator for new approaches to — and new ventures for — local news. This is made possible by a cadre of entrepreneurial, community-focused journalists fueled by philanthropic support from the Chicago Community Trust, home to Press Forward Chicago, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and others.
Block Club was named after the community clubs in the city — first created by the Chicago Urban League during the Great Migration — that serve as local resources and work to find solutions to local problems. This ethos of putting mission before profit is important to Block Club and the other news start-ups in the city.
I met one of Block Club’s co-founders, Jen Sabella, who is also the news organization’s co-executive editor, in a modest but smartly appointed newsroom, high above Michigan Avenue in the Chicago Loop.
A fresh start, she explained, was an opportunity to forge traditional beat-based reporting and marry community-based, shoe-leather journalism with the freedom philanthropic support afforded.
“We know we’re not going to make a lot of money doing this,” she said. “We just want to do it because we think Chicago deserves it.”
“When you meet someone every day who’s showing up to your kids’ schools meeting or your local development meeting, that builds trust, and we need that trust right now.”
According to Sabella, the Block Club approach is to be journalist-run but community-minded, in some ways a continuation of the DNAinfo formula. In fact, there was a blog called Block Club at DNAinfo before it closed.
The new Block Club is able to make decisions about coverage without regard to whether the residents of a community or advertisers there can subsidize that coverage. That has built a loyal following in the community, and it has grown Block Club into a strong and sustainable newsroom — with 38 employees and 20,000 paying subscribers — that now covers most of Chicago’s 77 community areas.
This approach to local news has also allowed Block Club to tap into an interesting dynamic in the news business: local news sources are held in higher regard than national ones, as a 2022 poll from Gallup and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation found. The public trusts local news more.
Sabella spoke repeatedly about how Block Club sought to build and maintain this trust and how central it is to the organization’s mission. “When you meet someone every day who’s showing up to your kids’ school meeting or your local development meeting, that builds trust, and we need that trust right now,” she said.
Deloris Lucas, a community activist on the South Side of Chicago, put it this way when discussing Block Club and its young reporter with whom she spoke: “It’s invaluable to have somebody that I know, feel good about, that I know will report the good news.”
Buoyed by community support and philanthropic investment, a range of mission-driven, community-based local news organizations have sprung up in Chicago in the last decade.
City Bureau, which bills itself as “journalism lab reimagining local media,” states among its core values that it believes in “holistic, structural change focused on equity and inclusivity.”
In 2018, City Bureau created the Documenters Network, which has trained thousands of citizens to document public meetings in 11 cities across the country and provide accountability.
As Morgan Malone, City Bureau’s former director, said, “The future of news is participatory.”
Borderless magazine, a nonprofit online publication that launched in 2017, has among its missions the “reimagining [of] immigration journalism for a more just and equitable future.”
ProPublica Illinois, which launched in Chicago in 2017, was Pulitzer Prize-winning ProPublica’s first regional newsroom. And Chalkbeat, which was founded in 2013 but launched a bureau in Chicago in 2018, covers education issues. These join Chicago Public Media, which in 2022 acquired the Chicago Sun Times, forming one of the largest nonprofit newsrooms in the nation.
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In many ways, these organizations are filling a vacuum. Even in large cities with relatively robust news corps, there has been retrenchment and redirection of resources and focus away from local news coverage, especially on the neighborhood level, resulting in fewer reporters covering communities.
In other ways, the new nonprofits are expanding and democratizing coverage, making it inclusive of more voices and perspectives and illuminating a wider variety of lives.
The revolution that these organizations represent is in some ways decidedly retro — “I would describe Block Club Chicago as kind of an old school community newspaper,” Sabella says — but with the latitude upstart nonprofits have to reimagine and experiment.
An essay by Charles M. Blow
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