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HICAGO—The reinvention of local journalism started on a very long commute.
In the fall of 2014, Andrea Hart, a Chicagoland native who worked for the
education nonprofit Free Spirit Media, invited Darryl Holliday to speak about
City Bureau is training young reporters to improve coverage of underserved
communities.
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local reporting with her 15 young adult students. The 28-year-old DNAinfo crime
reporter had been working on a book of graphic journalism that told the story of Kedzie
Avenue, one of Chicago’s longest streets. One of Hart’s students, it turned out,
commuted nearly two hours from the far south side to a college prep high school near
Kedzie. Shortly thereafter, Holliday was riding the train into the city with that student
—learning from her as she recorded an interview for a piece about the experience.
Hart and Holliday soon bonded over their respective frustrations about the media. He
hoped to change how Chicago newsrooms often used “deficit language”—words like
poor, minority, or crime-ridden—to describe predominantly black and Latino
neighborhoods on Chicago’s south and west sides. Hart, then 28, felt local news needed
to have “a really honest, explicit, unapologetic assessment of the problems in
journalism: newsrooms are racist. They’re not equitable because they only have white
people.” She also believed training young diverse journalists could ultimately change the
culture of newsrooms.
As Chicago’s media battled the problems facing many newsrooms nationwide, from job
cutbacks (U.S. newsrooms shrunk at a rate of 24 jobs a day from 2008 to 2017) to the
stalled quest for diversity, Hart and Holliday brainstormed potential ways to mend local
journalism. Chicago’s shrinking media landscape had spawned a new wave of
independent outlets like DNAinfo a hyperlocal news site that shuttered in 2017 and
Chalkbeat Chicago, an education-focused outlet. Instead of recreating the structure of
traditional newsrooms, they decided upon an incubator space where experienced
reporters would be paired with emerging journalists from communities that historically
had been ignored or misrepresented in news coverage.
The following year, City Bureau formally launched a pilot fellowship, which mentored
different “tracks” of journalists—in high school, college, and in the early parts of their
career—on how to better cover their neighborhoods. Joined by two other youthful
veterans of the trade—Harry Backlund, publisher of the South Side Weekly, and Bettina
Chang, an editor who had worked for Chicago, DNAinfo Chicago, and Pacific
Standard—they recognized the potential for civic journalism. Chicago residents, too,
grasped the importance of building a pipeline of journalists from a set of varied racial,
ethnic, and socioeconomic backgrounds. And funders, including the Chicago-based
Robert C. McCormick Foundation, helped City Bureau raise a total of $77,500 that first
year to build what would later be called the “j-school of the streets.”
“We didn’t have to convince people that there wasn’t lack of diversity,” Backlund, 30,
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said. “Everybody knew. Media organizations knew. Residents knew.”
For the past three years, City Bureau has trained over 80 journalists, producing more
than 110 stories, including nuanced pieces about nationally watched scandals in
Chicago, such as the stalled efforts to enact police reforms following high-profile officer-
involved shootings, as well as deeper exposes into how government has failed to protect
communities from toxins in their walls and water pipes. Similarly, City Bureau has co-
published stories in every kind of news source, from smaller local outlets (Chicago
Reader, Chicago Defender, WBEZ 91.5-FM) to some of the world’s largest publications.
(The Guardian, The Atlantic, New York Times). City Bureau’s alumni have gone on to
secure other fellowships—including at The Intercept and ProPublica—while others have
landed full-time positions with Chicago-based outlets like In These Times and USA
Today’s “The City.”
But City Bureau didn’t just bring the community members into the newsroom; it
brought the newsroom out to the wider community. City Bureau opened their newsroom
each week to the public, providing community members with an in-depth look into a
journalistic process that residents believed had often disregarded their priorities. By
redefining how communities engaged with reporters, the founders hoped this new
model could inspire heightened levels of civic engagement. Beyond that, they created a
program called “Documenters” that paid Chicagoans to cover long-ignored back halls of
government.
In recent years, Chicago, a deep blue city whose mayor once served as President
Obama’s chief of staff, has drawn the ire of President Trump—who has sought to frame
the Windy City as a symbol of urban dysfunction, one caused by failed Democratic
policies, and of skewed reporting by media outlets he loves to deride as “fake news.” But
City Bureau, while acknowledging the historical failures of coverage by the media, has
nevertheless bet big on the idea that more local journalism is also a solution to problems
besetting these communities. In the process, Backlund, Chang, Hart, and Holliday
discovered that by making better, more diverse newsrooms; they may be helping to save
communities that have suffered from decades of inadequate coverage.
“I don’t see a future for local news unless we figure out a new model,” says Carrie
Brown-Smith, director of the City University of New York’s social journalism master's
program. “There are a lot of individual newsrooms doing these kinds of [engagement]
projects. But it’s rare for it to be infused in the DNA of a whole organization instead of
one-off project.”
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Last year, City Bureau won a $1 million grant from the The John D. and Catherine T.
MacArthur Foundation, which is now helping to spread its model of community-
centered journalism to states from Mississippi to Michigan. On the heels of a recent
award from the Reporters Committee for the Freedom of the Press—for advancing
“values that strike at the core purpose of our First Amendment”—City Bureau recently
launched its biggest project yet, Documenters.org, a website that compiles information
about hundreds, if not thousands, of public meetings into a single centralized site. The
new site—which now helps residents more easily get to meetings or, if they miss one, get
information after the fact—has the potential to push City Bureau’s influence into even
more cities and states. But as excited as the founders are about that wider reach, they
believe City Bureau’s ultimate measure of success will always hinge on their work in
Chicago.
“City Bureau is putting the power of journalism into the hands of regular people,” said
Manny Ramos, a former City Bureau fellow, who now writes about the south and west
sides for the Chicago Sun-Times. “They’re trying to show communities: We’re going to
report on tough issues, and we’re going to hold ourselves accountable to you. We want to
hear your voice.”
***
A curious 23-year-old with bushy eyebrows, Sebastián Hidalgo was just the kind
of aspiring journalist City Bureau’s founders hoped they could reach. A self-taught
photographer, Hidalgo had earned a little money freelancing for small outlets, covering
everything from street festivals to an anti-Trump rally. But he had ambitions to
document a much richer story of Pilsen, the historic Mexican-American neighborhood
where he had grown up. He knew there was more to life there than just the shootings
that larger news organizations tended to focus on, if they bothered to cover the
neighborhood at all. He well understood the trauma of gang violence—he had almost
been shot himself on the way home from an assignment—but he also saw the pain of
families forced out by gentrification.
Desperate for professional guidance, and the support of like-minded colleagues, he
applied for a 10-week fellowship at City Bureau.
“As a photojournalist, you’re usually by yourself,” Hidalgo said. “City Bureau was
offering me work with a team—a learning process where I would be paired with
experienced journalists. This was going to allow me to grow in a way I hadn’t before.”
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In the fall of 2017, Hidalgo teamed up with three other fellows to document an
experimental court in Chicago’s North Lawndale neighborhood that used peace circles to
arbitrate cases involving nonviolent crimes instead of traditional judges and juries. He
was encouraged to follow his photographic instincts as well as his personal ethical
compass about how to capture the lives of his subjects while still respecting their
humanity.
“You build trust in communities by showing up to meetings, talking to people, sharing
reporting, and asking for feedback,” said Jenny Casas, a producer for USA Today’s “The
City” podcast, one of the program’s professional mentors. “[Hidalgo] brought a lot of
that to this project.”
As he photographed North Lawndale, Hidalgo also received help selecting images for his
project on Pilsen. His mentors at City Bureau urged Hidalgo to follow his instincts to
avoid tired imagery—mothers wailing near yellow crime tape, a chalk outline of a body
in the street. One night in August 2017, at the scene of a shooting near Harrison Park—
one of five he had witnessed in a three-week span—he was able to use his empathy for
his subjects to produce more powerful work. Hidalgo had approached Jezebel Patlan,
the sister of the 16-year-old victim, when he saw her lifting the police tape. He offered
his condolences, told her he was a photojournalist from the community and asked her
permission to take pictures. She agreed.
“I didn’t want to photograph a bloody mess—it served no purpose,” Hidalgo said. “But in
a way, Jezebel became this representation of what it looks like and what it feels like to go
through something like that. That was very important.”
Hidalgo’s experience was emblematic of a phenomenon that researchers from the
University of Texas had found in 2018 when they surveyed residents of the west and
south sides who said they felt “underrepresented or poorly represented” in local news
compared to north side residents. Yet despite their experience of receiving negative
coverage, those same residents—just like Jezebel Patlan—were more willing than
northside residents to be engaged with news organizations. But some were also
suspicious that it would do any good. Faced with that occasional skepticism, City
Bureau’s founders emphasized the ways their training might improve the lives of
residents. “We weren’t asking for something back,” Holliday said. “We were being
additive.”
An early example of that came in 2016 when Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s police
accountability task force released its nearly 200-page report following the death of black
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teenager Laquan McDonald by a white police officer. City Bureau asked its readers for
help. Partnering with civic-minded tech startup Smart Chicago Collaborative and the
journalism production company Invisible Institute, City Bureau paid half a dozen people
—including journalists, lawyers, and students—to conduct interviews, dig through
reports, and analyze public documents. The hope was to provide context to a dense
report that might not otherwise be read. Five days later, the “Documenters” had
annotated the report on Genius, a platform typically used for providing context around
rap lyrics, and shared it with the public. More than 1,000 people viewed it that first week
and dozens added comments. Later, they presented their work in public talks and
classroom presentations, where they showed students how to enter their comments
about their encounters with police.
“We aimed to be thorough and digestible,” Chang, 30, said. “It was more than just a
summary with five takeaways. It became something where Mike from West Englewood
could say: ‘This happened to me in 2015, I filed a report, and no one ever followed up
with me.’ Suddenly, it was right in front of you.”
City Bureau made Documenters a permanent program to train residents—ages 16 to
73—to cover public meetings like professional journalists. Documenters like Englewood
native Samantha Smylie, a recent graduate of Oberlin College, have learned how to take
notes, analyze data, and share newsworthy information on social media. In early 2018,
Smylie was paid about $15 an hour to attend a Chicago Public Schools meeting and
submit her notes to the City Bureau staff, which then made the notes available to the
public. Some Documenters have covered public meetings simply as a way to become
more civically engaged. But for aspiring journalists like Smylie, participation in the
Documenters program can lead toward admission into City Bureau’s civic reporting
fellowship.
“As someone who didn’t go to j-school, I didn’t know how a story was made,” said
Smylie, who later became a City Bureau fellow, and has landed freelance assignments in
local publications like Block Club Chicago, which provides hyper-local coverage of the
city’s neighborhoods. “Now I can reverse engineer a story. I can follow a story. I can
figure out those things.”
On a recent Wednesday night in Experimental Station, a nonprofit community center
near the edge of University of Chicago’s campus, Chang, one of City Bureau’s co-
founders, led 10 fellows through a brainstorming session on the places where people get
information about local elections. The fellows broke into smaller groups to discuss their
projects. At one table, Michael Romain, Annie Nguyen and Aaron Allen compared notes
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about their reporting on the upcoming elections in a far west side neighborhood. Chang
slid into a chair to hear their ideas. They started selling Chang on a profile of an
alderman candidate whose bid had been denied four years earlier after someone
challenged the signatures she needed to declare candidacy. (The candidate had
described the move as “typical Chicago electioneering.” The person who contested her
signatures was a political operative who, years earlier, had consulted for the incumbent,
according to a 2015 DNAinfo article.)
“It’s about bigger issues of who’s holding – and retaining – power on the west side of the
city,” said Allen, a recent college graduate from the city’s west side.
“It’s sort of a David and Goliath story,” adds Romain, a Chicagoan who works as the
editor of the Austin Weekly News, a hyper-local paper focused on west Chicago
neighborhood of Austin. “It shows what a neighborhood political machine is.”
Chang peppered the fellows with questions: How do we know the probe is frivolous?
How are you going to tell this story? How much reporting have you done?
Satisfied with the answers, she asked one final question: “Where do you want to pitch
it?”
***
City Bureau has grown beyond its initial plans of just being a pipeline for more
journalists from underrepresented communities.
“People thought we were about diversity—but we were really about equity,” said
Holliday. “We need more diversity in newsrooms, certainly. But we also need news to be
responsive to communities.”
City Bureau has hosted more than 90 “public newsrooms”–free weekly meetings where
journalists present stories and discuss reporting with community members. The
founders are now assisting news organizations like Mississippi Today in launching
similar engagement events. Public radio station WDET 101.9-FM has recruited City
Bureau to help launch a “Detroit Documenters” program. Last year, WDET trained and
paid about a dozen community members to tweet and take notes from education-related
meetings. Several other newsrooms have reached out to City Bureau since they released
a new website that complies information about locations, agendas, documents for scores
of public bodies. On that same site, Documenters can sign up for assignments and
upload their meeting recaps.
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“Now it becomes a question of how to grow,” said Joe Germuska, executive director of
the Knight Lab at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, and a City
Bureau board member. “How do you share your model but also stay focused on the civic
aspects specific to each community?”
While City Bureau’s growth has been fueled by big checks from some of Chicago’s largest
foundations, Brown-Smith, of CUNY’s journalism school, remains cautious in her
optimism about nonprofit journalism’s future. The traditional ad model is bottoming
out, she notes, but the nonprofit model still comes with its own set of sustainability
concerns. “There are limits to philanthropic money,” she says. Her point is underscored
looking at City Bureau’s latest financial records: Foundations accounted for 90 percent
of the nonprofit’s $1.1 million in revenue in 2018. To diversify its funding, City Bureau
hired an employee whose main focus is to grow its “press club,” a membership program
that offers donors exclusive newsletters, t-shirts, mugs, and a book of City Bureau
photography. “We want to have to have as diverse of funding sources of possible,”
Backlund says. “The more individual memberships, the better.”
As City Bureau finds its financial footing, its founders are also grappling with how to
measure impact in a way that captures not just clicks but civic impact. Holliday concedes
that existing digital metrics like Chartbeat, which many news outlets rely on to monitor
readership, may not work for City Bureau. At the same time, Hart believes that civic
engagement might also be measured beyond just voter turnout: “How do you spend your
money? Where do you go to meetings? How are you showing up [to events]?”
City Bureau’s founders hope that, with enough engagement, disenfranchised Chicagoans
will be able to hold institutions accountable and dissuade wrongdoing. Holliday would
like to see City Bureau’s suite of civic journalism services eventually function as an
“early-warning system” resembling ones that warn coastal residents about tsunamis.
“The best thing we can do is put ourselves out of business,” Holliday said. “If every news
outlet was thinking along these lines—How do we responsibly report about communities
of color that we aren’t currently serving? How do we put resources into cultivating the
next generation of journalists?—we wouldn’t need a City Bureau.”
Until that happens, Chicagoans like Hidalgo will rely on City Bureau to help elevate their
voices. With the support of his fellowship, Hidalgo compiled a nuanced, intimate
portrait of Pilsen: images of children playing in the streets and angry residents yelling
over a community center’s closure; low-riders celebrating Mexican Independence Day
and students wearing costumes for the Day of the Dead. Last January the New York
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Times’ Lens blog published a selection of his work.
“I hope my photographs allow an audience to demand and scream for change,” he told
the New York Times. “I want them to see with their hearts.”
But the best opportunity to have emerged from his time at City Bureau wasn’t the local
and national assignments that followed his New York Times placement. It was one
found on the other side of Harrison Park. Last year, a curator for the Pilsen-based
National Museum of Mexican Art, who had planned an exhibit examining the
neighborhood’s many layers of gentrification, asked if he might show Hidalgo’s work
alongside a dozen other artists. He agreed. His photo of Jezebel Patlan now hangs on a
gallery wall.
“It’s one thing to report in a community,” Hidalgo said. “It’s another to report for the
community.”
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