City Club of Chicago: Press Forward Chicago – Strengthening Local News

June 10, 2024 Featuring remarks from The Chicago Community Trust President and CEO Andrea Sáenz and John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation President John Palfrey – Panelists: Sarah Conway (City Bureau), Jacqueline Serrato (South Side Weekly), Trina Reynolds-Tyler (Invisible Institute) & Mackenzie Warren (Medill Local News Accelerator). Moderated by Olivia Obineme (Public Narrative) City […]

June 10, 2024

Featuring remarks from The Chicago Community Trust President and CEO Andrea Sáenz and John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation President John Palfrey – Panelists: Sarah Conway (City Bureau), Jacqueline Serrato (South Side Weekly), Trina Reynolds-Tyler (Invisible Institute) & Mackenzie Warren (Medill Local News Accelerator). Moderated by Olivia Obineme (Public Narrative)

https://serve.castfire.com/audio/5093341/City_Club_-_Press_Forward_Chicago_2024-06-11-193941.64kmono.mp3

City Club event description:

Chicago is home to nearly 80 independent news outlets, many of which have garnered national attention and acclaim. Our city is an epicenter for experimentation, innovation, and collaboration. However, beneath this exterior lies a challenge—many Chicago news organizations, despite their excellence, are undercapitalized.

By making philanthropic investments in a diverse range of news outlets, Press Forward Chicago aims to ensure residents have access to relevant, credible, and trusted information.

Join us at the Experimental Station for a reception and conversation about transforming support for local news in Chicago and its impact in our community. Hear from philanthropic leaders, media experts, and local journalists, including two recent Chicago journalists who won the Pulitzer Prize winners for Local News for their cross-newsroom collaboration.

Speakers
Sarah Conway
Sarah Conway is a senior reporter at City Bureau and writes stories rooted in records and data about Chicago’s deeply marginalized and overlooked people.

In 2024, Sarah won the Pulitzer Prize in Local Reporting for Missing in Chicago, a seven-part investigative series with City Bureau and the Invisible Institute that exposed systemic patterns of mismanagement in Chicago police’s handling of missing persons cases — which disproportionately affect Black women and girls. Published with the Chicago Reader, South Side Weekly, The TRiiBE, and Word in Black (a groundbreaking collaboration of 10 legendary Black news publishers), the investigation came at a critical moment in Illinois as elected officials work to address Chicago’s missing persons crisis.

Sarah was a Social Justice News Nexus fellow at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism and an International Women’s Media Foundation (IWMF) reporting grantee in 2019. There, Sarah designed and wrote Asylum City, a year-long look into the stories of asylum seekers in Chicago that culminated in a 10-part project that included first-person narratives, reported features, and a nonfiction graphic novel. IWMF named Sarah one of 19 women changing journalism in 2019 who “against all odds are turning the tide with reporting that challenges traditional narratives and brings new stories to light.”

Sarah is a New York University’s Arthur L. Carter School of Journalism graduate. Before Sarah’s career in journalism, she was a public survey project manager and researcher focused on civic engagement in Iraq. Sarah lived and worked in Ghana, Madagascar, Niger, and Iraq.

Jacqueline Serrato
Jacqueline Serrato has been the editor-in-chief of South Side Weekly since 2020. Previously, she worked as a contributor to The Chicago Reporter in 2019 and Multimedia Producer at Hoy Media from 2017 to 2019. She has also worked as a Production Assistant at WTTW/Chicago PBS from 2016 to 2017 and an editor at Pilsen Portal (Chicago Voz) from 2015 to 2016. In 2015 she was a WBEZ Community Reporting Fellow at Chicago Public Media. She has received multiple awards, including the 2022 Studs Terkel Award, Public Narrative’s 2022 Community Media Award, and the 2022 Peter Lisagor Award.

City Club video

Trina Reynolds-Tyler
Trina Reynolds-Tyler is the Data Director at the Invisible Institute, a journalist, and a native of the South Side Chicago. She leads Beneath the Surface, a project employing machine learning to identify gender based violence at the hands of Chicago police. Trina works to document how communities unable to depend on the police are forced to create safety and accountability outside of the carceral state. As a data scientist, she centers the practice of narrative justice in her inquiries.

Trina won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize in Local Reporting for the investigative series Missing in Chicago.

Trina is an abolitionist and trained restorative justice practitioner, an organizer with Not Me We, and is serving on a University of Chicago council attempting to measure the institution’s impact on local residents of the South Side. She developed the skills to use data science for real world problems as a Pozen Center for Human Rights intern with the Human Rights Data Analysis Group (HRDAG), and was a Pearson Institute Fellow. Trina holds a masters degree in public policy from the University of Chicago.

She has spoken at the Yale Access and Accountability Conference (2022), Stanford Women in Data Science (2023), and gave the Community Keynote at the ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (ACM FAccT) (2023)

Mackenzie Warren
Mackenzie Warren directs Northwestern Medill’s Local News Accelerator. He specializes in transforming organizations through research and insights, content strategy, business strategy, new product development and executive leadership development. Before coming to Northwestern, he held a number of executive roles at the USA TODAY Network/Gannett, the largest publisher in the United States. As senior director of news strategy, he guided large Pulitzer Prize-winning titles like USA TODAY, the Detroit Free Press, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Arizona Republic, Cincinnati Enquirer, The Courier Journal in Louisville, The Tennessean in Nashville and others through their transition to consumer-supported businesses.

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Olivia Obineme
Olivia Obineme is a content and people strategist and visual journalist based in Chicago, Illinois. She is currently the director of journalism and media engagement at Public Narrative, a nonprofit organization in Chicago that focuses on narrative change through community bridge-building, workshops, and programming. She is also a coach for the 2024 Local News Accelerator program at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, leveraging her expertise to foster growth and innovation in journalism among various communities.

A proud first-generation Nigerian-American and Baltimore native, Obineme holds a master’s degree in media innovation and entrepreneurship (now known as media innovation and content strategy) from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. Her work has been featured in various publications, and she has received recognition for her contributions to journalism projects, including the Peter Lisagor Award and the Maryland-Delaware-DC Press Editorial Award. Additionally, she has been involved in various journalism programs and organizations, including the Chicago Headline Club, where she served as the 2023 VP of FOIA Fest, leading its fully hybrid version and bringing it back to in-person engagement since the height of the pandemic.