Block Club Chicago | Bringing Independent, Neighborhood News Back to the Windy City
Block clubs have been a staple in Chicago for more than a century. Whether serving to acclimate newcomers to the city’s many neighborhoods to keeping an eye on the comings and goings of the block, the clubs and their hand-lettered signs are about community. About connection.
“Block club” is also the perfect moniker for Civil’s newest Newsroom: Block Club Chicago. Its founding team is Shamus Toomey, Jen Sabella and Stephanie Lulay. If you’re from Chicago, those names may sound familiar: until recently, they comprised part of the core team behind the dearly departed DNAinfo Chicago. Its sudden and unexpected closure last year left Chicago searching for the lively and credible neighborhood news stories it offered up day after day.
With that in mind, Toomey, Sabella and Lulay, who will begin publishing new stories later this spring, have but one simple message for those readers:
“We’re back!”
According to the three co-founders, Block Club Chicago will have the same neighborhood-centric focus for which DNAinfo was known. Reporters will be embedded in the communities they cover, allowing them to better find stories, listen to residents and stay in tune with the issues that matter to real people. Neighborhood news doesn’t happen in a Downtown office, so these reporters will be in coffee shops, sandwich shops, taverns or just walking the neighborhood searching for great stories. They want to tell the stories overlooked or neglected by traditional news media, the stories people will be talking about to their friends after they read them.
Like DNAinfo, Block Club Chicago’s tenacious reporters won’t have traditional beats like transportation and education. Instead, Block Club Chicago will divide the team by the neighborhoods they cover. They want Chicagoans to know they’re covering the neighborhood from within, and that they’re as invested in the neighborhood’s happenings as any other resident. If you’re living in Wicker Park, for example, you could be regularly running into your local reporter walking the area.
At Civil, we speak often about our belief in the vital role that local journalism plays for ensuring overall civic health — and how digitally focused, ad-driven revenue models have made it increasingly scarce. We’re honored to be able to play a part in helping to revive local journalism by introducing a new funding model that takes the middleman out of the equation. Newsrooms should be dictated by the relationship between reader and journalist — not the business concerns of a disconnected third party.
We can’t think of a better standard-bearer for this approach than Block Club Chicago, given the significant role its editors and reporters previously played at DNAinfo Chicago. That publication’s closure was one of the great journalism tragedies of 2017, and it was rightfully mourned by many inside and outside of Chicago. We’re confident that this team can restore hope and inspire others around the world that there’s a new way to sustain local journalism.
If you’re in Chicago, be sure to sign up for Block Club’s mailing list to stay up-to-date on their official launch. Get in touch with their team if you’ve got tips for important local stories that others have overlooked or ignored.
UPDATE: February 12, 2018:
It’s been less than one week since Block Club Chicago was officially announced. We never doubted its team’s ability to rally the community’s support for their mission to bring back neighborhood news to Chicago — but it’s amazing to see the extent of the support it’s garnered to date.
Its Kickstarter campaign, which aimed to raise $25,000 over 30 days to support additional operational expenses, has generated more than $136,000 from 2,283 backers and counting.
On behalf of Civil, THANK YOU for stepping up and proving that people are not only willing to pay for news, but that they’re enthusiastic to do so. Here’s a small sampling of some of the press coverage around Block Club Chicago:
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For those of you outside of Chicago who share our passion for reviving local journalism, please share this with your friends. If you’ve got an idea for a local-focused publication of your own, consider applying to launch your own Newsroom on Civil.
