We’re thrilled to introduce our first cohort of Documenters Network sites, launching this Fall

By Max Resnik

For the past six years, City Bureau and our partners in Detroit, Cleveland and Minneapolis have trained and paid thousands of community members to document local public meetings. The Documenters Network, our growing national community of practice, has collectively covered more than 2,300 public meetings and paid more than $300,000 to local Documenters. Local innovations like the Chicago Documenters Newswire and Cleveland Documenters’ Community of Practice have been remixed and implemented across the growing network. This year, we’re thrilled to welcome our first cohort of Documenters sites, weaving collective learning into the design of new programs right from the start.   

 When City Bureau launched Documenters.org in 2018, co-founder Andrea Hart wrote:

The beauty of Documenters is its simplicity — anyone can start a similar program elsewhere. We often wonder what it would mean to replicate it beyond Chicago with mission-aligned partners. City Bureau prides itself on authentic placemaking through contextualized civic media, so how could this happen in another city, like Detroit? Or a rural town? The demand is there — we’ve heard from various journalism or journalism-adjacent organizations that are feeling the same local news pains across the country.

We no longer need to wonder. In the past four years, we’ve seen the launch of Detroit Documenters, Cleveland Documenters and Minneapolis Documenters and we’re thrilled to welcome Atlanta, Fresno and Omaha into the Documenters Network in 2022. 

Atlanta Documenters

Our friends Canopy Atlanta launched their community journalism nonprofit in 2020. In the past two years they’ve brought innovation, curiosity and collaboration to the way news and information is created in Atlanta. Their mission, ‘to equip metro Atlanta residents to tell stories about the issues their communities care about most’ is a natural fit for Documenters and we’re thrilled that Canopy will be bringing Documenters to Georgia.

Fresno Documenters  

Fresnoland is blazing the trail for collaborative local media in California’s central valley. For the past two years, the team at Fresnoland have partnered with City Bureau to run a localized, low-tech version of Documenters and we’re thrilled to welcome them as an official network partner. “Fresnoland exists to make policy public – by, for, and with all residents of the central San Joaquin Valley.” Our first location on the west coast, we can’t wait to build and grow with the team at Fresnoland.

Omaha Documenters

In Omaha, the team at The Reader, an alternative news monthly, launched a new nonprofit, the Omaha Institute for Nonprofit Journalism (OINJ) to bring Documenters to Nebraska. OINJ works to support local media and journalism innovation in the Omaha Metro area and are building a community advisory board to guide the Documenters community.  

In each of these cities, community members will be trained and paid to Document local public meetings. These public meetings are the most regular and accessible way for community members to learn about and influence the civic process. Documenters contribute to a central pool of knowledge, serving as a baseline for collaborative journalism, while acting as trusted sources of information in their neighborhoods. 

We believe that the Documenters Network can thrive in cities and towns across the country, and we’re building systems to support growing interest. That demand has inspired our team to create new opportunities for local Documenters and staff to connect across the country. These communities of practice inspire innovation across the network and lead to projects, friendships and community nationwide. 

This year we launched a national community of practice for Documenters to complement the local communities of practice in each city. Documenters share tips for creating media and find solidarity in the challenges of navigating local government. This summer, City Bureau will convene staff from across the country in Chicago for our first staff summit. The mentorship we see at the local level, where Documenters support, inspire and challenge each other, we want to cultivate at the national level as more cities enter the network in the upcoming years. 

We’ll be sharing more about the launch of these programs later this summer. If you’re interested in connecting with the Documenters Network, drop us a line. If you’d like to bring Documenters to your community, find more information here