City Bureau started as a series of experimental journalism projects among four collaborators. Andrea Hart and Darryl Holliday first met when Andrea invited Darryl to speak about local reporting to her class at Free Spirit Media, a youth-media program in North Lawndale on Chicago’s West Side
City Bureau’s first project was a reporting fellowship designed “to restore civic media coverage of the south and west sides of Chicago by training a new generation of young reporters in the practice of urban journalism.”
City Bureau’s early work was shaped by a rich network of collaborators. The Invisible Institute incubated much of City Bureau’s early work, and the
The first fellowship had no budget. The co-founders served as volunteer staff/mentors and fellows volunteered their time and then divided up the proceeds from any payments for stories that were published with local partners2015-01-25 14:00:00
Network of Collaborators
2015-01-25 14:00:00
Chicago’s Young Journalists
City Bureau hosted its first public workshops around the release of the Invisible Institute’s Citizens Police Data Project. These workshops helped residents understand the patterns in a huge release of police misconduct records and
City Bureau convened one of its earliest major public forums in North Lawndale at the Firehouse Comms Center, bringing residents, journalists, and community leaders together for dialogue about neighborhood issues and local news needs2015-11-04 00:00:00
North Lawndale Town Hall
The first fellowship focused on police accountability reporting in a pivotal moment for police reform in Chicago following the release of video footage showing the fatal police shooting of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald.
After a year of grassroots programming, City Bureau incorporated as an organization on January 7, 2016 in order to receive donations and grants and pay stipends to fellows2016-01-01 00:00:00
City Bureau Officially Becomes an Organization
City Bureau reporters Yana Kunichoff and Sam Stecklow and Co-Founder Darryl Holliday, alongside collaborators at the Chicago Reader, investigated how police union messaging distorted public understanding of police violence. The team built their own database comparing
City Bureau launched the Task Force Tracker, an annotated, crowdsourced public tool built with the Invisible Institute and Smart Chicago Collaborative to make Chicago’s 2016 Police Accountability Task Force report accessible and actionable2016-06-01 00:00:00
Task Force Tracker