CHICAGO — Block Club Chicago hit a milestone earlier this month that meant a lot to us.
Our nonprofit newsroom has now been open longer than the one we replaced — DNAinfo Chicago.
Why is that important? Because when the owner of DNAinfo shut us down in 2017 after four years and 11 months of publishing news stories about Chicago, things looked bleak.
The ad-reliant model meant to sustain us didn’t work. The news industry was reeling. Our funding was gone. And we were out of jobs.
But so many jilted DNAinfo fans convinced us you’d support us with subscriptions, donations, T-shirt purchases, kind notes and the type of word-of-mouth testimonials money can’t buy that we got back on our feet.
We changed the name, changed the business model, created a nonprofit and got back to work.
Now that we’re officially older than DNAinfo, we know we need to keep doing the work to win your support day after day. That’s what daily news is all about.
We’re ready to do it.
To our current subscribers: We wouldn’t be here without your support. If you’d like to make a tax-deductible donation, click here. We’ve got a new, exclusive print from artist Steve Shanabruch featuring 42 of his neighborhood illustration for donations $50 and over. It’s an exclusive design he made to celebrate Block Club’s fifth birthday. Check it out here.
If you’d like to support us, you can sign up for a $59 annual subscription here — and get Steve’s 16-x-20 print highlighting his neighborhood drawings.
We’d love to add 500 new subscribers before our the end of our June birthday month. That would get us to 20,000 paid subscribers. It’s an ambitious goal — but so was starting a news organization.
We’re sure glad we did.
Watch our “On The Block” TV show on The U, CW26 and MeTV.
Listen to “It’s All Good: A Block Club Chicago Podcast”:
