City Bureau

Through the Documenters program, City Bureau trains and pays community members to attend local government meetings and report back on them.[8] As of October 2019, over 1000 people had enrolled in the program.[2] In conjunction, City Bureau has helped to develop a City Scrapers toolkit, an open-source tool for gathering and standardizing information about all of the different public meetings in a city.[4] The program has also expanded beyond Chicago with a pilot program in Detroit.[9]

Much of City Bureau's early reporting and community outreach focused on police accountability.[10] They co-published stories with newspapers including The Guardian[11] and the Chicago Reader about misinformation in the aftermath of police shootings.[12] The latter article focused on the role that the Chicago Fraternal Order of Police played in shaping the narrative around shootings involving members of the Chicago Police Department and won a Sidney Award for outstanding investigative journalism.[13] As an example of their efforts to better engage local communities, when the Chicago Police Accountability Task Force published their lengthy report following the murder of Laquan McDonald, City Bureau and several Documenters partnered with the Invisible Institute and Smart Chicago Collaborative to generate an annotated version of the report that readers could then contribute their own stories overtop.[6][14]