Q&A: Jen Sabella, Director of Strategy at Block Club Chicago
This week, The Idea caught up with Jen Sabella, the Director of Strategy at Block Club Chicago, a Civil-network, hyper-local journalism startup that reports on Chicago’s neighborhoods.
Tell me about your career path what brought you to Block Club Chicago?
I went to school at Columbia College in Chicago for journalism and worked on the student paper there. I then waitressed for a few years while I freelanced. I got a job doing crime reporting at the Chicago Sun-Times for a few years in my early twenties. Then, the still-new Huffington Post launched a Chicago site, and I took over that initiative for two or three years.
Then I got a call about a site called DNAInfo and I was like, “What is this? This is a terrible name.” But I was told that it was a big investment in actual boots on the ground journalism, so I was intrigued, because at the Huffington Post I was mostly aggregating.
I took a job at DNA and quickly became obsessed with it. In 2012 I helped build a team there, moved into the newsroom, filled out beats, hired reporters, and I was there for five years until it shut down in November of last year. Ricketts shut the whole thing down, which was absolutely devastating for everyone in the newsroom, and the city honestly. We heard from so many people.
The day it shut down I knew we had to do something to get it back. I had been pushing for a long time for a sort of membership or paid product. I did believe our readers would pay for it because it was news they couldn’t get anywhere else in the city, and Shamus, Stephanie (the other editors at DNA) and I started exploring that right away.
All the reporters there kept in touch; we had a Facebook chat, we built a slack channel, and would get together and would bounce around ideas and put feelers out, responding to people who emailed us saying they were interested in giving us money or raising money or getting this going in some way.
We took a lot of meetings with people in the venture capital world and other news organizations. Ultimately, we decided we wanted to be a nonprofit newsroom and do it kind of our way; we don’t want to be under someone else’s umbrella, we already know how that ends. We learned a lot from our time at DNA.
We were not sure where we were going to get that money. Civil had reached out to Shamus, before DNA even shut down, just letting him know they wanted to launch a newsroom in Chicago. When DNA shut down, they circled back to us and were like, “hey what about now?”
We met with them and we were still like “Cryptocurrency? What?” I was probably the most skeptical out of everyone about it. But then Nicole Bodi joined the team at Civil — she trained me at DNA Info in the New York office. She showed me the CMS, she gave me a boot-camp on how to be a great neighborhood news editor, I just deeply admire her, and I would honestly follow her off a cliff.
So, when she said she was part of Civil, I was like, alright I’m in. There really weren’t strings attached. It was a bunch of people with a mission aligned with ours, saying they were going to give us money to start up and build our tech, and I honestly couldn’t have asked for anything more at that point. So, we started Block Club, and it’s been live for about 6 months now, which is crazy because I feel like it’s been the biggest whirlwind. It’s great to be back covering the neighborhoods again, albeit not as many right off the bat, but we’re working on it.
Can you tell me a little bit more about Block Club beyond its work with Civil?
Block Club is basically like DNA Info, reborn in Chicago. We are a hyperlocal news site, our reporters are embedded in their neighborhoods: they don’t come downtown to an office, they work from the neighborhoods every day. Each reporter has a cluster of neighborhoods they’re responsible for.
It’s kind of like a mini newspaper in every area: they’ll cover everything from education and crime, to openings and closings, to feature stories on interesting people or things going on in the neighborhood. At DNA we had about 15–20 full time reporters, and we only have six full-time reporters at Block Club so far. It’s definitely a lot smaller of a footprint in the city.
It’s a fast moving site, we don’t do a lot of investigative work — we are talking to news partners about doing more of that work — but it’s more of a daily news structure, so every morning we have new stories up, we do breaking news, we send out newsletters, each reporter is kind of responsible for owning their beat.
How would you characterize Block Club’s long-term strategy?
I have a vision of equitable coverage throughout the city through a combination of philanthropic donors and subscriptions. I’m completely obsessed with the Texas Tribune; their model is amazing. Right now, we do have a paywall up: you get five free stories and all breaking news free, but then you hit a wall. Ultimately, I would love to not have that, and right now we’re just trying to grow and we want to see if that is attractive and if that gets people to subscribe.
Long-term, my fantasy is that we grow this way: say we get a grant to cover two neighborhoods. (About $150,000 could cover two neighborhoods.) That would cover everything we need. One neighborhood would be an area would be one that may not be able to support itself through subscriptions, and the other area would be a neighborhood that would.
We’d be able to cover a low-income neighborhood that still needs coverage, as well as a higher income neighborhood or a more engaged neighborhood that’s going to pay us for the news. If we’re able to get a grant to cover Lincoln Park, for example, which is a neighborhood on the North Side of Chicago with higher income people (we had a very big following in that neighborhood at DNA Info) we hope that people in that neighborhood would step up and subscribe or contribute donations either way, and that neighborhood would pay for itself and another neighborhood might not.
If we look at the numbers of how we left DNA, we had the numbers: how many people subscribed to our newsletters, the reach we had, the ad sales we had in those neighborhoods, it would all be honestly all be white North Side neighborhoods. That’s not what we want to do. We just need a different way of funding it. I think that right now there’s a lot more foundations and a lot more organizations looking into business models for newsrooms, and I think that this is a way to do it more equitably, and I hope that people are receptive to that argument.
Just speaking broadly about Chicago right now, there’s this huge thing happening here in media specifically: startup independent media kind of demanding better, better from how national organizations cover our city and the Midwest at large, and better from the news organizations that have been here for decades.
It used to be the big competition thing, “we beat you on this story.” But these new organizations like Chalkbeat, ProPublica, City Bureau, and the Tribe. We’re all communicating all the time on how we can supplement each other’s work. And we can just make more of an impact by being collaborative and uprooting the way things happen in terms of covering Chicago and the Midwest.
I grew up here and thought I would move to New York, San Francisco, or D.C. to do journalism. I never thought I would stay here. And I kind of just kind of became obsessed with being a champion for the Midwest as an amazing place to do the news. There are so many stories to tell, and I do think that I see a lot more innovation and a lot of rad work happening on a local level in Chicago.
If Civil does not reach its $8 million goal, will Block Club Chi continue to work with Civil?
It’s been an exciting journey with Civil from the start, and we’re hopeful for the future. Launching newsrooms and trying to come up with new ways to keep reliable journalism flowing isn’t easy. We’re tremendously proud to be working with a group that is so invested in solving problems and trusting journalists. But we also know that while Civil is helping us get off the ground, to stay in the air, it’s also going to take the support of our readers and of our community. That has been our plan all along.
No matter what happens with the token sale, I really believe Civil wants to create a platform that brings journalists and readers together. I know the token process is complicated and really the whole “journalism blockchain” thing is hard to wrap your head around (it certainly was for me), but I feel lucky to work with people who are willing to be bold and try new things to make reporting the news sustainable.
What’s the best thing you’ve seen in media recently from an organization other than your own?
The work that ProPublica Illinois is doing is just amazing. They just kind of came in here like a wrecking ball: they’re covering immigration issues, digging into stuff that bummed a lot of people for years, in terms of enforcement for parking tickets, and how it’s super racist, which we all sort of knew, but they’ve come in and done some incredible work locally here.
Also shout out to Popula, another Civil newsroom, run by Maria Bustios, I remember the day it launched, I was just like this is so rad. She’s so smart, and it’s stuff you’re not going to see anywhere else, and I love Alt Weeklies and I’m sad about how a lot of them are closing down, and I find a lot of hope in the work that she’s doing at Popula.
