How Block Club Chicago reached 20,000 paying subscribers

A $183,000 Kickstarter campaign provided the seed capital to get it off the ground.

Layoffs in the local news sector are, sadly, a regular occurrence, but three Chicago journalists decided they weren’t going down without a fight.

In November 2017, the news startup DNA Info laid off its entire staff, and it was only a few months later that three of its editors launched a Kickstarter that raised over $183,000; they used that capital to launch Block Club Chicago, a nonprofit that seeks to put a journalist in each of the city’s neighborhoods.

Flash forward six years, and Block Club has a robust news gathering operation that’s funded by 20,000 paying subscribers, foundation support, and a growing advertising business. In a recent interview, co-founder Stephanie Lulay walked me through the site’s launch strategy, its unique approach to neighborhood-based reporting, and why she thinks Block Club’s model can be replicated all across the US.

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Transcript

Hey, Stephanie. Thanks for joining us.

Hi, Simon. How are you?

I'm doing great. So you co-founded a really successful local news outlet. It's called Block Club Chicago. What was your background in local news prior to that?

Yeah, Simon, my background is I was a local reporter and then became an editor. I was laid off like many journalists. The newsroom that I worked for, DNA Info at the time, here in Chicago.

Was that the first local newsroom you worked for?

No. Yeah, we can back up all the way. Sorry. Yeah, I always knew that I wanted to be a journalist. For me, it kind of started at age three. I would ask why about everything. Why? Why? Why? Why? And my grandfather would always remark, does she ever shut up?

And I'm not sure that I have ever shut up and stopped wondering why. And that's really driven my passion for journalism. It's such a gift to be able to learn about the world and what's going on in politics and our communities and all of that. After graduating from the University of Illinois, I did my undergrad and my master's there. My first job in local news was working for the Aurora Beacon News. Here in Illinois, that's our second largest city. I did a little bit of everything there from covering schools and small towns to eventually covering politics in the city.

Then I left to join DNA Info, which at the time was a startup looking to cover Chicago by neighborhood. It kind of flipped the beat system on its head. Instead of having a daily newsroom where you're focused on cops and courts and education, traditional beats, the reporters at DNA Info were focused on covering communities, like covering these neighborhood stories from the ground up. So I was very inspired by that mission and eager to join them. And I joined first as a reporter and a neighborhood reporter, and I eventually became a senior editor.

And DNA Info, it wasn't just in Chicago. There was also one in New York, correct?

There was also one in New York and the billionaire Joe Ricketts that founded DNA Info also ended up buying the Gothamist network.

Yeah. I actually met the guy. I did like a presentation at the New York office about headlines or something like that. And he just happened to be there that day. And so yeah, like you said, it was really innovative in that it changed up the beat system where, rather than, like you said, traditional local newspapers – if you have enough staffers, there will be a board of supervisors person, here will be an education reporter, a crime reporter, and stuff like that – but instead, DNA Info kind of broke up those beats in a different way by saying here, these are the neighborhoods and you need to be hyper specific on this neighborhood.

How did that manifest itself? It's like they just had that neighborhood specific stuff on the website? Or were there ways where if I live in a specific neighborhood, I could access just that information? Like, were there newsletters or social media accounts that were dedicated on the individual neighborhood level?

Yeah, at DNA Info, that's exactly how it worked. We had newsletters that were dedicated just to certain neighborhoods, and Facebook pages. Facebook was big back then. Facebook pages dedicated just to certain neighborhoods and serving those neighbors. And our goal there was just really to be writing about what the neighbors cared about. In a city as large as Chicago, when you are the one cops reporter, let's say in a newsroom, there's a lot going on on a crime beat every day. Right? Or if you're the one education reporter, same thing. There's a lot going on citywide education wise. And it was our goal just to always be writing about what the neighbors cared about from the ground up and get to those stories first by continuously serving those neighbors and building connections with them.

Yeah. But at the same time, cities are centralized. How did it handle that centralization? Cause like, obviously there are edicts that are going out at the school wide level, and so how did you balance that? You want to obviously cover the local school in that neighborhood, but obviously there are things coming up from up high that are going to affect that one school. And then obviously you don't want to write the same story five times about five different schools. I don't know. How did you approach that kind of more centralized beat reporting?

Yeah, I think the key to tackling those central beats is we did have some central beats. Like we had a city hall reporter at DNA Info. A lot of how we tackled that at DNA Info, though, was cross-newsroom collaboration. If there are two reporters noticing that this is an issue popping up that's going to affect the whole city, they would team up to show different perspectives of how it's affecting the neighborhoods, but across the city.

And was the plan for it to be an advertising-supported organization?

Yes. Yes, it was a free site. And the bet was that we could get people to support this neighborhood news mission with advertising, but specifically like neighborhood focused advertising. So there was a whole sales team that mimicked the neighborhood reporter footprint. So like for instance, I covered Pilsen and the West loop for a while. There was also a West loop and Pilsen focused ad manager.

So obviously you can say the experiment didn't work out, the other thing is you could say maybe Joe pulled out prematurely, but I think like the the series of events were that somebody, maybe it was the whole DNA Info newsroom or maybe it was just in New York newsroom, they announced that they were going to unionize and he very quickly decided that he was just going to shut down the entire DNA Info network and I think the Gothamist network completely at the same time. Is that kind of the gist of what happened?

That's exactly what happened. I was on Fox, our local Fox channel earlier that day, talking about DNA Info stories. I got back to my desk and we all were told that our website had gone blank and that it would be replaced with a letter from Joe Ricketts.

And that letter from Joe Ricketts was public facing, just said that, you know, he... given the New York office's decision to unionize, that he was shuttering DNA Info and its affiliates.

Yeah, and that was a very weird move for him to, like, on the same day he was closing it down just to shut down the website. Like, what was the strategic advantage of that, you know? Or do you think that was just out of spite or, like...

There's not much value in speculating. I don't know if it was spite or not. I think it's entirely probable that he didn't understand – again, he’s not a journalist, that he didn't understand what this would mean to the staff. In fact, they did put the archives back up and made plans for that. I do think it's a possibility that they just didn't understand to journalists what an archive of our work means.

So he did that. I forget how much time went by, but this was after all the staff had been laid off, but like a bunch of public radio stations banded together and bought the Gothamist network. Did they buy DNA Info too, or did they get the assets of DNA Info or what was it?

Yeah, so this actually happens after... After Block Club Chicago has already started. One thing that we were fortunate is we did get severance. So we had a little bit of runway. to start talking about what's next, right? Whether we're going to go get jobs in other newsrooms or quit journalism. And something interesting that happened in the meantime is we started hearing from readers all across the city, just encouraging us not to give up and just saying how much they needed this neighborhood coverage and they couldn't get it anywhere else. And we looked around in the meantime to see in the city, like, was a newsroom going to pick up this mantle, like do this kind of neighborhood focused reporting. And it really, Simon, it really didn't happen. And that really led to us, you know, thinking seriously about starting something and It was pretty fast. DNA Info shuttered in November 2017. By February 2018, we had announced that we were forming a new newsroom called Block Club Chicago that would be focused on Chicago's neighborhoods. And that day we launched a Kickstarter too, so people could support us right away.

And when you say we, what does that mean? Was it just all the former staffers, DNA Info? Was it a small number of staffers? Who else was it?

Yeah, DNA was big. So like we knew that there was no possible way that we could get enough public support day one for us all to have full time jobs like we did at DNA Info. So what we did is our three co-founders, me, myself, Jen Sabella and Shamus Toomey, who are all editors at DNA Info, got together with five reporters. And we decided to launch it small and to see if we could build it sustainably from a small newsroom that we could support to, you know, to build it back slowly and sustainably, especially considering the current and former and, you know, environment and media then and now.

Yeah. And so did you decide prior to it launching that it was going to be a nonprofit?

Yeah, we did a lot of, we're journalists. That's like one thing that was, you know, different. We understand journalism. And so we did a lot of research just on for-profit models, nonprofit models, talked to a lot of leaders in the nonprofit news movement about the advantages and yes, decided to go nonprofit.

We actually ended up, at the time we were also, talking to another newsroom about potentially housing this operation within that newsroom. We had talked to a venture capitalist who was very interested in this model. So we really did explore a lot of different avenues before settling on forming this as a nonprofit.

And then also you partnered with, I think I could be wrong about this, but an organization called Civil. Am I getting this right?

Yeah, no, you're getting this right. Um, yeah. Shout out Civil. Civil was trying to launch journalism on the blockchain. It was a very ambitious plan, but one thing that they were doing at the time is they needed newsrooms to test out this journalism on the blockchain – kind of to be partners in what they were doing. And it was like perfect timing for us. It also was perfect timing for some other newsrooms that have flourished since then. 

Civil didn't work out, it failed but all of these newsrooms because of the pretty much no strings attached investment they made in us they didn't care if we were for-profit or non-profit they just wanted us to do good journalism with their investment. Because of that, it really gave us the seed funding to start up, coupled with the money that we raised from the Kickstarter campaign. We actually broke a record for most funded local newsroom at the time on Kickstarter. And yeah, so those two coupled together really gave us the seed funding to do this. It wasn't from one foundation. We see that a lot with newsrooms starting up with $10 million already in the bank. This was not that, it was very scrappy.

Yeah. And just before you talk about the Kickstarter, so like Civil, the way that it worked, this is, you know, ancient history now, but I think it offered an ICO, initial coin offering, which is kind of like a precursor to NFTs where it would basically launch a new crypto coin that people could buy. And I guess the theory was was the coin would act kind of act almost like a stock price and that the value of buying the coin is if your media organization succeeded, the value of your coin would go up so you had like a sudden flood of crypto investors giving you money because they were buying coins and technically sort of kind of investing in you even though they didn't really own equity all they owned were these coins. 

There were all these high hopes for the platform that you would be able to use your coins to vote on certain things and it really was ambitious and an interesting plan. I'll say that.

And then how much from the ICO, how much did you raise just through that?

Oh, we didn't. Okay. No, we did not raise money from the ICO at all. Civil did. 

Oh, so you didn't get any real benefit from that affiliation other than maybe some free press?

I'm not even sure that the ICO was successful to be honest. 

Oh, okay. I assumed that you got like a big flood of money. So even though that failed, it at least gave you some startup capital. So your startup capital came mainly through Kickstarter. 

Civil invested cash in us.

Oh, yes. Interesting. So not to dwell on this dead thing now because obviously it doesn't really matter, but like what, what did they get in exchange for the cash?

Us? Um, they got us being affiliated, you know, we were trusted journalists who were trying this out for them, right? Like in thinking through the tech with them. But really, Simon, I understand why you have questions because it was a great deal for us. I'll just say that.

So how much cash did they give you?

About a million dollars after all is said and done. But it was like over a year, 18 months. 

Nice. Okay. So you did benefit from that or that affiliation at least. And then the Kickstarter, you raised like $180,000. Is that right?

Yeah, $183,000 we raised from 3,100 backers.

And what were the different tiers and stuff? What were people donating? Were they just doing it to support you or were they getting something out of that?

Yeah, it was really a range. Our lowest tier was the tote bag, I think, for $25. Our most popular was \ one year subscription for $50 instead of the $59 list price and the tote bag. So it was a good deal. And a lot of people did it. We had some local artists create interesting merch for some higher tiers. We had a party with a bunch of Kickstarter backers at a local brewery for like the 500 tier. So yeah, shout out to the local businesses too, they were key in supporting us getting this off the ground

And so you have like, you know, over a million dollars and kind of startup capital. So what did the staff look like when you launched in February 2018? How big was it?

See, Simon, we did not have a million. I mean, we did get a million dollars, but it was spread out. You know what I'm saying? It's like, yeah. So that's kind of how that worked. So yes. So we launched with three co-founding editors, myself, Jen Sabella, and Shamus Toomey, who had all been editors at DNA Info, and five reporters. We had to kind of scale back what we could support. And because of that, we weren't able to cover the entire city. We focused on some key neighborhood clusters that we had forged relationships in at DNA Info and would really support us at Block Club.

So you weren't trying to comprehensively cover the whole city at first?

No, because that's the opposite of what we believe neighborhood news should be. So instead, we decided to go small, focus on a couple of different neighborhood clusters, but spread out across the city. We did have beats on the north side and the south side. And yeah, that's how we launched.

We're listening to our readers. Like I said, Simon, that's, they reached out to us and said  we need this neighborhood coverage. And they would say to us too, why didn't you just ask us to pay? We would have paid for it. They really inspired us to look at how we could, potentially support this in alternative ways too.

Yeah. And at some point, I don't know how far into the future it was, those public radio stations bought the assets of DNAinfo and Gothamist and then basically just donated those social media accounts and email lists to you, right?

Yes. So WNYC acquired all of that, all of the DNA Info assets, all of the Gothamist network assets. And they sold some of them off to other, you know, like LAist went to the public radio station in LA, DCist went to WAMU, right? Yeah. Gothamist is with WNYC.

So I'm not sure if we reached out first. I think they reached out to us saying, would it be possible to donate the DNA Info assets to you? These are subscriber lists – a list of 100,000 email subscribers that you built up over five years at DNA Info. Can we donate these assets back to you? Part of the condition was that we would keep the archives alive, and we have to this day. So yeah, we got all of our email lists, all of our old social accounts back, all of that we could reignite, which was really exciting. 

So you launch in 2018. What were some of the early wins that you were like, okay this is really getting traction and this is working?

Yeah, I would say like the Kickstarter was the pivotal moment. I remember having internal spirited disagreements amongst us co-founders about how much because, you know, on Kickstarter, you have to raise a certain amount or you don't get the money. Right. we had a lot of debate about what our minimum raise should be. And I remember, I think we set it at $25,000, right? That first day, we surpassed that within three hours. And within 36 hours, we had raised $100,000 and promised to hire a sixth reporter because of that. Just seeing that enormous reaction out of the gates from people all across the city. And there was huge buzz around it too. Like we were on a ton of TV stations, like just all of the media was writing about it. National media started to pick up the story and listen, it's a good story. We were laid off and we dusted ourselves off and got back to work, you know? So I think the national media really rallied around our story too, but so many other people have the same story. It was an interesting time in media that people weren't just getting laid off and going out to pasture.

They were really seeing the opportunity and what we could rebuild. So that, and then also one of our earliest stories that really took off about a year after our founding, we broke the news about an alligator in a lagoon here in Chicago, which is not, alligators are not native to Illinois. We think it was like a dumped pet, but that story touched off. It was the story of the summer. Everybody, like national media, was just signing on Chicago to cover it. And we held a contest naming him Chance the Snapper. We had a very successful merch campaign around it, raising $100,000 to our newsroom. So that was another like... key moment that I would say, people really let us know that they liked what we were doing.

To kind of get back to the one lesson that you had about all the coverage you got, I feel like that's one piece of advice I'm giving too laid off journalists that like you're starting to see these writer cooperatives launching and stuff like that in the wake of mass layoffs and stuff like that.

And that's like really the perfect time to launch something like that, especially if it's multiple people from an outlet that's been laid off. There's this period of time where there's just like a lot of public sympathy and stuff like that, and you can actually get a lot of people excited about you launching some new outlet if you're kind of banding together and be like, okay, we have X number of months severance. Let's see if we can do something on our own rather than go apply for new jobs and that's kind of what you saw when the folks left Vice right before it collapsed and launched 404Media, or when all the editors resigned from Deadspin and launched Defector. I think that there is something about this where if you can time it correctly, you'll get tons of people sharing.

But so you got some early reporting wins. So like what happened? You raised this initial money. How did it become a more mature news organization where you had a more consistent funding source and then also began hiring out and started reporting in more neighborhoods?

Yeah, so in the early days, we were really focused on just building sustainably. So if we can raise the money, we hire more reporters, we cover more neighborhoods. That was the focus, right? And I mentioned that we had... about 3000 subscribers just from that Kickstarter, give or take,even before we launched. So we announced that Kickstarter in February and then we launched the new site in June of 2018. So the next couple of years, we really were just on an all out sprint to build subscribers. That really was our focus, even though we were nonprofit, we were seeking foundation support. We knew that if this was going to work, we had to get subscribers to support us at $6 a month or $59 a year. That's how this was going to be built. And so over time, we just kept building and building and building. We got to 10,000 subscribers.

We got to 15,000 subscribers and started onboarding new neighborhoods and hiring new neighborhood reporters to cover them. Each time we did that, our audience grew because we were bringing back that coverage to people who could support it,  because we were tapped in on what's happening in their communities. So it really fueled each other, each time we added a reporter, we added more subscribers. And today we have about 20,000 paid subscribers, or members, despite our site being a freemium model. Most of our news is free, all of our breaking news is free all, of our south and west side coverage is free, all of our election coverage is free.  All of our public health coverage is free, so as you can imagine during coronavirus, basically everything that we wrote was free.

So just to break down some of what you're talking about. I talk to a lot of local news entrepreneurs on this podcast. A lot of them start with large donors, large grants and stuff like that. And then they try to basically bring on small donors round out and diversify. It sounds like you were very heavily focused early on in being funded largely by individual small contributions. And so you say you have 20,000 subscribers. Are those members, or is that like an actual subscription strategy where you're – you said it's a freemium model. What's the carrot and the stick in terms of enticing people to convert into a subscriber paying $60 a year?

A good 90% of our coverage is free, but you will be asked to subscribe. There's certain things that are premium content, right? Like our development coverage, some of our government and politics coverage, just because it is so specialized. And that's how we really encourage people to subscribe. On top of that, our ongoing messaging that we are serving you and your neighborhoods and this is some very unique value that we're giving you as a newsroom, you can't get these stories anywhere else and you you should subscribe or you should donate to support us because that's what's going to keep this coverage that's so vital to your community going. And I think honestly, our best ambassadors for this are our reporters, like just being out in the communities every day, they show up to meetings day in, day out. They really get to know people. It's a lot easier to support local news when you see the person who's serving you all the time, right? Like out in the community, it's a lot more real to people, I think. And that's an easier way to say, I'm gonna skip my coffee today and kick in to support this local news site that's really important to me.

And for that stuff that's behind the paywall, is that like a hard paywall? 

Yes. But you would have to be reading us a lot to hit it.

What do you mean you'd have to be reading a lot? Because it's metered? 

Yes.  A majority of the people who give to us and support us, they give because they think it's important. This is like a vital mission to them.

So the paywall isn't necessarily converting that many people. It's because you are also putting in messaging around this. You need to support this and fund our work, basically. Are you doing fundraising drives or anything? Is it all just a constant drumbeat or are there dedicated fundraising drives that you have scheduled throughout the year?

It’s a constant drumbeat with dedicated drives. We always do a big campaign in the summer around our birthday. Each year that we've existed is big to us. Right. Each summer, we do a big drive. We always do an end of year holiday drive. It's a pretty cool promotion. Our readers really like this. We partner with a local artist who has done these beautiful prints of landmarks and neighborhoods all over the city. Yeah. He's done these beautiful landmarks  – basically you can get your neighborhood print when you subscribe to us, and we like to offer more than 50  –Chicago is really a city of neighborhoods. So people love that. So that's a great incentive, holiday gift for people to give every year and to subscribe at that time. Those are our biggest campaigns. We just did a great one giving people the opportunity to support local books nonprofit giving books to Chicago public school students timed with back to school. So people could subscribe and donate books at the same time. People really liked that. We're really just not afraid to try things too and to ask people in a lot of different ways to support us.

And do you have anybody on your staff that's focused on courting large donors or applying for grants?

Yes, we do. Thanks to the American Journalism Project, they have funded several revenue-focused positions here at Block Club. So we have somebody that is just focused on foundation grants. We have somebody that is just focused on major gifts. We have someone that is just focused on membership. We actually got advertising off the ground. That's been so successful, we have two staffers now that are just focused on advertising.

Like calling up businesses and selling ads.

Yes.

And what kind of ads are you offering? What kind of formats?

I would say our most popular is our neighborhood newsletters – advertisers can really get their message out there to certain neighborhoods with our neighborhood newsletters and there's really nothing like it that exists in our city – like there's no other way to in this targeted newsletter way to just like reach neighbors of Logan Square, for example, our advertisers really love those targeted newsletters.

Yeah. So if you go on your website, there's like a newsletter section and you can opt in to whatever neighborhood you want. It says the neighborhood, but it also says the reporter, I guess, who's writing that newsletter. So is it part of that reporter's duties to, in addition to just the standard reporting that goes on the website, to also put out the newsletter, and are they writing like original content for the newsletter or is it just a roundup of news? 

Yeah, with their editor, they're curating that newsletter. So they are deciding what the lead story is. They are deciding what other information should go into it. We not only feature our own stories, but also if there's another news outlet in town that has a great story about something, that neighborhood, we want to feature that too.

We really want those newsletters to be like, I can read this and know everything that's going on in my neighborhood. And then they also write a top to it. You know, they write a little letter up top, and it could be an anecdote from their reporting. It could be a deeper look into a story that they wrote. It could be, see you at the farmer's market this weekend. Our readers really like those because they're so personal. They're really getting to know their reporter.

And another thing that they really like about it is the newsletters are two-way streets. So all they have to do is hit reply and they will, to reach their neighborhood reporter, maybe with a tip or some help with reporting, it really gives them a way to interact and be a part of our reporting too.

And are those going out daily?

Our neighborhood newsletters are twice weekly. They're all sent twice weekly. And then we have a daily morning newsletter and then a daily afternoon newsletter. And then we have some topical focus newsletters too. Like we have a twice weekly arts and culture newsletter.

And in terms of like the pie graph of revenue of, you know, small donors, large donors slash grants slash advertising, what's that pie graph look like?

Yeah. So when Block Club launched, before the American Journalism Project invested in us, we were 70% funded by our readers. 70% of our funding was coming just straight from readers. And the balance was foundation support, a tiny bit of advertising, some events, some merch. That has really changed in recent years just because of some large investments that the American Journalism Project has made in us, but also, the McCormick Foundation also made a large commitment to us, to launch an investigative team here focused on the South and West sides. So today foundations make up a larger chunk of our support than they did in the past, but also so does advertising. Advertising is like a growing chunk of our pie. Subscribers remain a very strong revenue stream for us.

And then also, increasingly, events. We just held a huge Block Club block party here in Chicago, a free event, for all of our readers. It was awesome. And merchandise. Like I mentioned, we've had some pretty innovative, successful pushes with merchandise, not anything huge, but you know, raising a hundred thousand dollars from a shirt does certainly help our bottom line.

Do you create a podcast? 

Yeah, we do. We have a podcast that is focused on local news. John Hansen hosts that. Wh it launched it was really focused on good news. We just wanted to highlight good news stories that we were doing. That's so key to our mission too.

You know, Chicago really is demonized in the national media and there are so many things that our neighbors are doing to make our city a great and better place to live. And the podcast really launched to put a spotlight on those stories, stories that we were already doing, but in a podcast format. When it launched, it was super popular. With feedback from our readers, it really has morphed into a podcast that is just more generally focused on the news and our stories, not just these good news stories.

Yeah, if you watch only Fox News, Chicago is a dystopian hellscape. So how does the podcast fit strategically,, how do you think it helps? Do you sell advertising against it? Do you think it helps with fundraising or what's the kind of thinking of how it fits in?

We sell advertising against it, yes, and we are having success at that. But the reason that we launched a podcast is we know not everybody reads the news on a website like I do. We know from studies that have been done here in Chicago, particularly on the South and West sides, the majority of people get their news from TV news, actually. And, you know, that's also a reason why we have our own TV show, too. We partnered with WCIU, a local local affiliate here, and we produce a once weekly \news program, like kind of TV magazine style.  And it's all focused on our stories. Our reporters are featured in it. It's not something that I've seen done a lot of other places. And one thing that we're really excited about is it's not just exposure for us and not just getting our stories out and to new readers that might not be aware of Block Club Chicago. But WCIU also pays us for that partnership. It is a revenue generator to our newsroom.

And that's on like public access television or something?

No, it's WCIU. It 's a locally owned broadcaster.

And then you mentioned live events. What's the kind of strategy there?

Especially post 2020, 2021, where the world really shut down and we were so disconnected from each other. We just want to be creating ways for our neighbors to be gathering and interacting with us and our reporters. In real life and each other, just ways for us to get together, share ideas, all of that. So we're doing quite a bit around events, whether that's, you know, just like meetups at the local bar to meet your new reporter or or like member meetups. Right. Or we have a  Block Club book club where we highlight local artists and bring them together and they're interviewed by our reporters. Those events have like really run the gamut too, you know, it could just look like a book talk, a kind of a Q and A,  but we also recently had a new book that came out about beer hikes, like, hikes around breweries. And we went on a beer hike with our readers and it was super popular.

We're doing our next Black Club Book Club event. There's a new book out about Malort that is our famous liquor here in Chicago. It's horrible if you've ever had it. We have a whole event around Malort and that new book, too, that we're really excited about. So that we also do, you know, an annual fundraising event in the past that's looked more like a little bit more like a gala or, you know, an anniversary type event.

This year, we decided to kind of flip that on its head. And we did this big block party focused on highlighting local music, local vendors, local food, local beer, and local news. And it was really successful. We had 2,500 people come in the door. This was our first fest of that size. We just want to create ways for people to get with each other, but also learn about Block Club, learn about what we're doing and, you know, meet their local neighborhood reporter, you know, find ways to get involved with us.

Was it called the Block Club Block Party?

Yes. Yes.

Looking at all that you've done, like how replicable do you think this could be? Obviously we're facing this huge upheaval in local news, legacy newspapers are in retrenchment. Obviously there are lots of these small startups that are launching nonprofit and for-profit. Do you think that you could literally copy and paste this across a lot of different cities?

Yes, I do. I think that this is very replicable. I don't think it's going to look exactly like it does here in Chicago and it shouldn't. But with that said, you know, a lot of the newsrooms that we were talking about earlier that have had success at this, they share with us and we share with them. Several of them, we shared our playbook ahead of launching. I definitely think that there are all lessons that we can learn from each other. One would be we have to tell our story and we have to tell it a lot. People don't know these things. They don't know how bad the situation is in media. They don't know that people are getting laid off. They don't know that news deserts are popping up every day. It seems like they should know because we're all talking about it a lot, but they really aren't aware. So we have to tell our story a lot. We have to be ready to ask regular people for help. And, you know, that can be uncomfortable as a journalist, but I think people are really coming around to the idea that we have to have our readers support us. We need their buy-in if local news is going to survive.

And I forgot to ask you, how big is your staff now approximately?

Oh, yeah. That's a great question because that's something I'm happy to talk. Yeah. So we launched in 2018 with eight staffers. Today, six years later, we have a full-time staff of 37 journalists and our financial team that make sure that we all get paid.

And you now have journalists in every single neighborhood in Chicago?

Not every single neighborhood. We do still have some gaps, not many, but we are still working to fill in holes on the map. And I should say that our foundations have... here in Chicago have played a huge role in stepping up to support those. There are foundations that specifically support certain beats, particularly across the South and West sides, underserved areas of the city that long or never have been served well by the media.