This is What You Get for Reporting in the Open

Finding the unexpected at a City Bureau open house.

By Darryl Holliday

Examples of the photo essay created during our Open House — see full set below. (Photos: Maria Cardona)

What do you get on a warm summer night when 100+ civic-minded journalists, artists and community folks gather at Chicago’s Experimental Station?

Something unexpected.

Adeshina Emmanuel, Bea Malsky and Latricia Polk present their stories about Chatham.

We had a great night at our Summer Open House. (We had gold, limited-edition, variant logo City Bureau buttons at our Summer Open House!) But, more importantly, we saw our reporters step out of their journalistic comfort zones and explore new ways to interact with their audience — from giving presentations to collecting questions via our friends at Hearken to engaging in earnest conversations about issues of critical importance to the city. All in our South Side newsroom.

But one of my personal favorite parts of the night came in a series of 22 moments built around a single prompt—an idea generated and led by our reporters. I’ll let them explain:

Last Friday Aug. 19, City Bureau held its Summer 2016 Reporting Cycle culmination event at 6100 S. Blackstone where attendees visited various interactive booths to learn about the investigations we’ve been working on.
Our team has been researching a story about the promises and failures of community policing in Chicago, and as part of our project, we asked attendees to answer the prompt, “What Should Police Know About You?” People wrote their answers on a bright-colored Post-It, and some participated in our photo essay, writing their thoughts on black-and-white portraits that we printed during the event.
At the beginning, some people were nervous about who would see these answers and whether they’d be judged for them. However, by the time the photo booth closed, 22 black-and-white photos were collected with messages that went beyond “What Should Police Know About You?” People wanted to shatter misperceptions of how they may be perceived on the surface by police.
-Andrea Salcedo and Manny Ramos (City Bureau Summer ‘16 Reporters)

The following series by photographer Maria Cardona is one of many special interactions we found at our Summer Open House—some were curated and most were unexpected, but they’re all helping to guide our approach to journalism, civic engagement and reporting in the open.

The news reports from our Summer reporting teams will be published in the coming days and weeks but I wanted to take a minute to consider the unfiltered words of the friends, family, partners and followers who stopped by our newsroom August 19 to celebrate the work of our current cohort and the future of our public newsroom.