Based in the South Side of Chicago, City
Bureau's work with people in the area is split across three
programmes: a paid 10-week fellowship where journalists of all skills and
levels report on issues of interest to the community; a 'documenters' strand,
where anyone can apply to document events in the public interest and receive
journalism training to do so; and the public newsroom, a free weekly workshop
where journalists and readers get together to discuss and share resources.
City Bureau was founded as a non-profit civic
journalism lab in 2015 by Darryl Holliday, Andrea Hart, Bettina Chang and Harry
Backlund, who wanted to tackle some of the issues in their
fields of expertise, including journalism, publishing and education. They
focused on addressing some of the gaps in the local media landscape in Chicago,
such as the lack of diversity in newsrooms and the lack of representative
coverage, and find a business model that could serve these initiatives.
Community events as part of journalists' role
With support from the McCormick
Foundation, City Bureau first launched its reporting fellowship
two years ago, for people who can't afford unpaid internships to learn from
experienced journalists and report on big-picture stories or investigations in
their communities.
There are three 10-week cycles per year, with each
cycle training 10 reporters. City Bureau also partners with a variety of local
and national news organisations to re-publish stories produced by the fellows
or who are interested in collaborating on stories.
"More and more so we are also encouraging
[fellows] to consider what it means for journalists to do the reporting, but
hold community events or workshops where the reporting is front and center but
there's more of a face-to-face approach with the areas we are covering,"
editorial director Darryl Holliday told
Journalism.co.uk.
"I want to elevate being able to hold a
meeting on the same level as being able to do an investigative story. I want
them to be thinking of options broadly, and to include direct contact and
information sharing as part of their role as journalists."
In the previous fellowship cycle, City Bureau took
over a special issue of the volunteer newspaper located in
their building, the Southside Weekly, to talk about lead
poisoning in Chicago.
Fellows produced investigations, features,
illustrations and graphics on the topic, but they also hosted three community
forums to "give more life" to the data and information they had
gathered and talk about solutions.
Reporters often use a tool called GroundSource to
start conversations with people on the topics they cover, and they gather
feedback at the early stages of working on a story through the Bureau's public
newsroom.
The public newsroom consists of free
weekly workshops open to members of the public, with speakers ranging from
journalists to artists and other people who "have thoughts on media and
how it relates to community".
During the workshops, attendees can discuss
issues affecting the community but also learn reporting skills, such as finding
and analysing public data or using the Freedom of Information Act.
Democratising journalism skills
The 'documenters' strand
is City Bureau's most recent initiative, training members of the public and
paying them to document public meetings and events around the city. The 250
documenters in the organisation's network come from a mix of backgrounds, and
their ages range from 16 to 69.
The team has created meeting templates which
documenters use to take notes at different events, and the information they
gather becomes useful data for the stories the fellows are working on.
"The goal is to democratise journalistic
skills. As journalists, we have a lot of skills and some of them can be
delegated, whether that's note taking, interviewing, using your phone as an
audio recorder, or learning about FOIA."
In June, City Bureau received funding from the
Knight Foundation and Democracy Fund to build a platform to better manage its documenters.
The platform will scrape the websites of local councils and other institutions
where public meetings are held, and put them into a calendar that can also be
used by other newsrooms. It will also enable the team to assign people more
easily to cover metings, with the goal of ultimately making the information
they gather open-source.
"The idea of this programme is
can we have a person in the community documenting every single public meeting
in Chicago? I think the answer is yes. And can we know about each of these
meetings? The answer is also yes."
Aside from its 250
documenters, City Bureau has trained 60 reporters in the last two years, and
has a network of about 700 people across its public newsroom group on Facebook
and its Slack channel.
Its team consists of two
people working full-time (all the founders are still involved, some on a
part-time basis) and the organisation is primarily supported through foundation
grants, although Holliday said they are looking at additional revenue streams,
such as memberships.
"There is traditional
impact like 'our story got the mayor fired' or 'X resigned because we unearthed
a scandal' and those are entirely valuable, that's a core function of good
journalism," Holliday added.
"For City Bureau, it's
more about sharing our resources, our skills and our reporting in a way that
encourages and empowers people to engage in civic events themselves. "I am less interested
in City Bureau forcing the mayor to resign than I am in empowering communities
to figure out what they want from that mayor."