When their billionaire owner abruptly closed Chicago’s DNAInfo in 2017, three former editors decided to build a different kind of news source out of the remnants. Block Club Chicago launched seven months later, with a mission to combine neighborhood reporting with public service journalism and to do it under a nonprofit business model. It was…
A growing number of media outlets are banning the publication of police mugshots–and in some cases, removing them from digital archives, in the wake of a national reckoning on racial justice that followed the murder of George Floyd last summer in Minnesota. Both the Chicago Tribune and St. Louis Post Dispatch have adopted new policies…
College Republicans at Iowa State University tweeted after the November presidential election that students should “arm up” and later encouraged students to show up to “Stop the Steal rallies” in Des Moines and Washington, DC. The university has refused to comment on the tweets encouraging students to participate in the Jan. 6 insurrection in DC…
Some news media are smarting from the late night passage of a groundbreaking Illinois criminal justice bill last month that left them without a chance to report on the substance of sweeping legislation that is now before the governor awaiting his signature. Police have launched a media campaign claiming the “dark of night” legislation endangers…
Ever since he started covering the Ohio legislature and governor in the middle of the pandemic last summer, Josh Rultenberg, a reporter for Spectrum News 1, has tried to limit the time he spends at the state capitol building. After the Jan. 6 insurrection in Washington, D.C., he’s become especially leery. “Truth be told, I’ve…