Three years after launching our Public Newsroom with your support, we are transforming our workshop series based on your feedback.
By Ellie Mejía
Three years ago, City Bureau launched a campaign to fund the Public Newsroom, a new program where journalists and residents could hold space together and discuss pressing local issues. Nearly 700 people across the globe chipped in to make it happen. Since then, the weekly workshop series has been a regular site of communal dialogue and mutual learning.
In 2020, we’re reimagining the Public Newsroom. We want to make sure we’re in keeping with our community engagement values, particularly that “authentic community engagement takes time, intentionality and space to evolve. We resist rushing this process and will not operate on timelines that don’t accommodate our community.” The question at the core of this redesign will be: How can the Public Newsroom best equip and support Chicagoans to fulfill local information needs?
Over the years, we have aimed to respond to feedback from people who attend and host Public Newsrooms—after all, without these folks the program wouldn’t be what it is. In 2019 alone, for example:
We hosted 37 conversations across the city and learned that attendees often wanted community resources containing the lessons we collectively generated during workshops. So we compiled and published attendees’ responses to the questions: How should journalists cover sexual harm? And how should they report on your own neighborhood?
We heard that our work could be more impactful and accessible if we hosted workshops across the city, so we went to 14 new venues—more than any year past.
We deepened already-existing neighborhood connections to expand on our place-based work. In Little Village, for example, we collaborated with El Foro del Pueblo on bilingual workshops on aldermanic accountability. In Austin, we partnered with local organizations to discuss Black motherhood on the West Side, asset-based education reporting and upcoming local elections, among other topics.
We thought about how to center the people hosting our workshops, asking ourselves: How can we bring more curators into the fold? How do we support them in developing workshops tied to community-driven action? In the fall, artist Felicia Holman curated a series on caring for ourselves and our communities in the face of the 2020 elections, borrowing practices of resistance from women artists of color.
To keep the Public Newsroom evolving in a healthy, locally responsive way, we’re leaning into this moment of transformation. Inspired both by our bright community and organizations like Neighbor Up, the Listening Post Collective and the Trans Justice Funding Project, we’ll be exploring the ways we can best support you.
So, we’ll be back with a new iteration of the program this spring. It will look different than before, but we promise the heart of the workshop series will stay the same. In the meantime, keep an eye on our social media for highlights from newsrooms past and drop us a line at info@citybureau.org if you have any questions.
See you this spring!
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