This workshop will explore methods for connecting and collaborating with your audience during the reporting process and after your story is published. We'll talk about how to identify your target audience, learn their needs, and develop a story accordingly. We'll also talk about how the "story" format doesn't fit every audience, and explore alternate ways of communicating, including events, flyers, and zines. We'll discuss the difference between reporting about vs. reporting for a community. And we'll talk about strategies for ensuring your finished work actually reaches the people who need it most. This workshop will involve breakouts where we discuss possible engagement strategies for participants own work. It's not required, but it will help if you come with a story idea or project in mind.

Presenter

Ellen Mayer is a community journalist, producer and facilitator. She's a producer for The Hoodoisie, a radical talk show about culture and politics. Most recently, she was politics editor for the South Side Weekly and City Bureau fellow. She started her journalism career at WBEZ's Curious City, where she learned to put audience curiosity and collaboration at the center of her work. She also spent two years as an Engagement Consultant for the journalism-tech startup Hearken, helping newsrooms around the world build relationships and engage more effectively with their audiences. She is also a recovering music journalist and ex-musical theater kid. She's from Brooklyn and enjoys arguing about the best place to find bagels in Chicago and convincing people not to move to New York.

Presenters will take participants through the steps of creating meaningful photography projects. This workshop will cover a range of topics from photography basics, including how to compose an image, to more advanced topics, including how to build a visual narrative and ethical approaches to visual storytelling. Attendees are encouraged to bring an idea for a photography project you’d like to workshop.

Presenters

Sebastián Hidalgo is an award-winning photojournalist and digital producer who uses photography to engage and explore many social and humanitarian issues affecting communities of color. He is also an educator and host of a bi-weekly editorial support group for freelance visual journalists. Hidalgo has covered a range of stories including the social effects of gentrification in Mexican-American communities, poverty in American suburbs, Donald Trump’s “zero tolerance” pilot program, and discrimination in the criminal justice system. He approaches every story and person with a sense of delicacy and vulnerability that respects the subject's humanity. He believes in the power of growing in conjunction with the people who are in front of the camera, as a witness, a bridge and, in some cases, as a collaborator.

Today, Hidalgo frequently moderates public discussions about gentrification and developing a photographic vocabulary in Photojournalism. As a member of DiversifyPhoto, he was named among 12 Emerging Photographers You Should Know by The New York Times and continues to freelance in Chicago and throughout the Midwest.

Pat Nabong is a Chicago-based visual journalist who is dedicated to challenging stereotypes and bridging gaps through visual storytelling. Through photos and videos, she explores the intersections of culture, identity and social justice issues.

She is currently a Gwen Ifill Fellow with the International Women's Media Foundation. Her work has appeared on Chicago Magazine, Chicago Reader, Narratively, and Rappler, among others. She completed fellowships with City Bureau, The Medill Justice Project, and the Pulitzer Center. She has received awards including a Harrington Award for Videography and a Crystal Pillar from the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences - Chicago/Midwest Chapter. She was a finalist for the 2017 and 2018 Peter Lisagor Award for Best Photography, Amnesty International’s Media Award for student journalism and a nominee for the World Press Photo’s Joop Swart Masterclass. She earned her master's in journalism at Northwestern University and is a member of the Authority Collective.

Pat Nabong & Sebastián Hidalgo are co-hosts of the The Visual Desk--a round table and support group for freelance visual journalists.

Join City Bureau and South Side Weekly for a special panel to discuss trauma-informed reporting. We’ve gathered three experts who can provide different perspectives and actionable advice on how to work with communities that have experienced trauma, with a focus on gun violence, state violence and gender violence. We’ll discuss how trauma affects people mentally, physically and emotionally, and the ethical limits of journalism in service of those populations.

Panel:

Hadia Zarzour is a Licensed Clinical Professional Counselor in Chicago. Hadia pursued her passion to work with Syrian refugees in Chicago and focus on their post-traumatic growth—their inner strength and resilience to adapt to a new culture. She is a co-founder of Insan, an international nonprofit organization providing psychosocial support to Syrian refugee children and adults in Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey; and a co-founder of Syrian Community Network, a nonprofit organization that focuses on supporting Syrian refugees in their resettlement. She has recently been certified in Global Refugee Trauma from Harvard University.

Jennifer Smith Richards has been a data reporter at the Chicago Tribune since 2015. Smith Richards previously covered schools and education for more than a decade at newspapers in Huntington, W.Va.; Utica, N.Y.; Savannah, Ga.; and Columbus, Ohio. Her work has touched on everything from sexual abuse in schools to police accountability to school choice.

Trina Reynolds Tyler works on gender violence at the Invisible Institute and is a South Side native and currently a Masters in Public Policy candidate at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy. A lot of her trauma-informed care experiences come from working with young people in Chicago. Whether through circle-keeping or facilitating classroom spaces, it’s important to her that young people are given the space to express themselves and talk about their experiences without being censored or sensationalized. In addition to working with young people, she worked with various media organizations as a fixer to put people in touch with community, while shutting down assumptions and expectations about what they were documenting.

Journalists have a lot of power, and when reporting, it’s crucial to do your best to avoid harm to the communities you’re covering and to ensure that your reporting is fair. Learn about journalism ethics and come prepared to discuss some tough ethical scenarios.

Presenter

Darryl Holliday is a journalist and media entrepreneur based in Chicago. He’s the co-founder and News Lab Director at City Bureau, a civic journalism lab based on Chicago's South Side. In 2011, Darryl co-founded Illustrated Press, a media production collective covering urban issues with comics, sequential art and traditional reporting. He's been cultivating and supporting innovative approaches to media coverage, newsroom diversity and civic engagement ever since—formerly as a beat reporter for DNAinfo Chicago and the Chicago Sun-Times. 

Learn the best practices in oral history gathering, including how to conduct oral history interviews around sensitive topics.

Presenter

Miles Harvey is the editor of How Long Will I Cry?: Voices of Youth Violence, a collection of oral histories that is now in its sixth printing with more than 40,000 copies in distribution. He wrote a play, also called How Long Will I Cry?, which premiered at Steppenwolf Theatre in 2013. Harvey’s previous work includes The Island of Lost Maps: A True Story of Cartographic Crime (Random House), a national and international bestseller that USA Today named one of the ten best books of 2000, and Painter in a Savage Land: The Strange Saga of the First European Artist in North America (Random House), which received a 2008 Editors’ Choice honor from Booklist, and a best-books citation from The Chicago Tribune. The recipient of a 2007-2008 Knight-Wallace journalism fellowship at the University of Michigan, he currently teaches creative writing at DePaul University, where he is a founding editor of Big Shoulders Books.

Learn how to construct a feature story that will get readers invested in your topic and how to do reporting that leads to compelling writing.

Presenter

Ben Austen is the author of High-Risers: Cabrini-Green and the Fate of American Public Housing (HarperCollins, 2018). His writing has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Harper's Magazine, GQ, The Atlantic, Wired, New York, Elle, The Best American Travel Writing, among other publications. A former editor at Harper's Magazine, Ben is a story consultant on The City podcast and a board member of The South Side Weekly. He is a native South Sider.

Mari Cohen is workshop manager and a longtime editor at the South Side Weekly, associate editor at Belt Magazine, and a freelance journalist. Her work has appeared in South Side Weekly, Injustice Watch, Chicago Reader, the Chicago Sun-Times, The Outline, and Belt Magazine. She has enjoyed making PowerPoints about journalism for her peers since high school.

How to you get the information you need for a good story? Learn from an experienced reporter about seeking out sources, conducting effective interviews, and doing research.

Presenter

Adeshina Emmanuel is a Chicago journalist whose work focuses on race, class, and inequity. He’s currently a reporter for Chalkbeat Chicago, where he helps tell the complex story of education in Chicago. Before joining Chalkbeat in May, Adeshina spent two years freelancing for local and national news outlets, including Chicago magazine, In These Times, Ebony, the Chicago Reader, the Columbia Journalism Review, and the New York Times. He also led in-depth reporting projects through City Bureau, a Chicago civic journalism lab. Adeshina has previously held staff positions at the Chicago Reporter, Dnainfo Chicago, the Chicago Sun-Times, and interned at the New York Times in 2012.

How do the folks at WBEZ, Serial, or [insert your favorite radio program/podcast here] craft their stories? There's a lot that goes into making an audio story, and while the tape you collect in interviews and in the field is important, the voice-over narration you write is the glue that holds it all together. In this workshop, learn the basics of audio story structure and how to write for the ear to hear. It's way more fun than writing for print! Come and find out why!

Presenters

Erisa Apantaku is the executive producer of South Side Weekly Radio. She's produced numerous stories for the Weekly, including an hour-long documentary about the history of Robeson High School that you can listen to at robeson.southsideweekly.com.

Jenny Casas (@jnnsmn) is a Chicago-based audio reporter and producer. She's investigated environmental crimes and local government corruption for USA Today’s podcast The City. She's reported on class and power for St. Louis Public Radio and covered restorative justice on the West Side and criminal law in Cook County for City Bureau. 

What is fact-checking and how do you do it? Come learn about how and why news organizations do fact-checking, how to identify the facts in a story, and what makes a good source. The workshop will be interactive—you will be guided through doing the first part of the fact-checking process. Feel free to bring a story or excerpt from a book or podcast to see how it would be fact-checked. Learning about fact-checking will also improve your reporting process and help you write well-sourced stories.

Presenter

Adam Przybyl is the Weekly’s editor-in-chief. He’s been freelance fact-checking for two years for publications like VICE Magazine and the Atavist. During that time, he’s made tough calls to bank robbers, federal attorneys, police chiefs, imprisoned refugees, gun-toting anarchists and everyone in between in the search for truth. He lives in Bridgeport.

How do you report on public meetings? Why would you want to? In this workshop, you’ll learn about what reporters and residents can learn at public meetings, what the rules around meeting access are, and tips for effectively reporting on one. You’ll have the opportunity to practice finding and preparing to cover a public meeting, so bring a laptop if you can. Public meetings are great for learning the ins and outs of local government and gaining knowledge that spurs deeper stories; feel free to bring an idea of a public body you’d like to know more about.

Presenter

Olivia Stovicek is a senior editor at the Weekly and a contributing editor at The Trouble. She’s covered public meetings for local outlets including City Bureau’s Documenters program, from City Council committees on zoning to the City Colleges of Chicago Board of Trustees. Her public meeting live-tweets have been called “🔥,” but she still hasn’t figured out the best way to have lunch during a seven-hour committee meeting. She recently completed a reporting fellowship at Injustice Watch focused on investigating the criminal legal system and judges.

Learn how requesting documents under the Freedom of Information Act can help you with your reporting. You'll learn how to make a request, what to do if your request gets denied, and other FOIA tips and tricks. If you can, bring a laptop to have the opportunity to make a practice FOIA during the workshop.

Presenters

Emeline Posner is a co-managing editor of the South Side Weekly and a freelance copyeditor and writer. Prior to this, she was the Weekly's Food & Land editor, editing stories about urban agriculture, environmental justice, zoning, and land use. Her favorite agencies to FOIA are the IEPA and the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District.

Sam Stecklow is a co-managing editor of the Weekly and a journalist with the Invisible Institute. He has previously been published by or worked for a lot of websites that don't exist anymore, like Gawker, The Awl, Select All, Ratter, Fusion, and DNAinfo. He's also been published by some outlets that still exist, like Chicago magazine and the Chicago Reader, and some that are in between, like Chicagoist. In 2016, he won a Sidney Award from the Sidney Hillman Foundation for his reporting on the Fraternal Order of Police.