Block Club Chicago is looking for reporters to join our new investigative team focused on stories from the city’s diverse neighborhoods, especially the often underserved South and West sides. Apply by May 19.
Successful candidates will join a team focused on rooting out corruption, wrongdoing and inequality, building on Block Club’s already impactful and award-winning investigative coverage, which in recent years revealed the West Side’s Loretto Hospital vaccination scandal, sweeping racial inequities in traffic stops and massive flaws in the COVID-19 testing industry.
The Skills
You’re right for the job if:
You are deeply interested in and passionate about reporting and storytelling that reveals how Chicago really works, from its neighborhoods to City Hall and back again, with an emphasis on how residents and communities are impacted.
You have at least five years of reporting experience that illustrates your passion for strong narrative storytelling in a way that connects serious issues and related data to people in the communities we cover.
You have experience producing journalism that exposes and documents inequality, discrimination and corruption.
You have a working knowledge of Chicago’s South and West sides and their neighborhoods. This includes leaders at all levels — from elected officials to block club presidents to nosy neighbors who are the best experts about their own surroundings.
You understand and embrace Block Club’s mission of reporting based in the city’s neighborhoods, and you’re a collaborator who will work well with the investigative team and Block Club’s broader cadre of neighborhood reporters, who in many cases will bring ideas from their beats to develop into investigative pieces.
You have experience acquiring public records, analyzing datasets and verifying sources to deliver accurate, timely and impactful investigations in a competitive market. You also have a passion for keeping up to date with the latest trends in data collection and acquiring documents through the Freedom of Information Act, court systems and other relevant resources.
The Perks
Salary: Commensurate on experience; range starts at $70,000
Full benefits (medical, dental, vision), 401K
Unlimited paid vacation, plus paid holidays, paid sick and maternity leave
Supportive, scrappy, tight-knit editorial staff
Requirements
This position is based in Chicago and requires the person to live in the Chicago area.
This is a work-from-home/office hybrid role, but the investigative team members should expect several days per week of in-person work at our Downtown office to work alongside and collaborate with colleagues.
A commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion is required. Block Club believes the diversity of our community is a fundamental strength of our region. Our mission is best fulfilled when we embrace diversity as a value and a practice. We maintain that achieving diversity requires an enduring commitment to inclusion that must find full expression in our organizational culture, values, norms and behaviors. Throughout our work, we will support diversity in all of its forms, encompassing but not limited to age, disability status, economic circumstance, ethnicity, gender, race, religion and sexual orientation.
How To Apply
Send us an email telling us why you’re best positioned for this job along with your resume, examples of your investigative work, a synopsis of the role you played in the projects and two references to jobs (at) blockclubchi (dot) org. Put “Investigative Reporter” in the subject line, please.
Deadline To Apply: May 19, 2023.
About Block Club
Block Club Chicago is a nonprofit, reader-funded newsroom dedicated to delivering reliable, nonpartisan and essential coverage of Chicago’s diverse neighborhoods.
Our newsroom was founded in 2018 by former DNAinfo Chicago editors and reporters after the award-winning site abruptly shuttered. We decided to call ourselves Block Club because we felt it reflected our mission: to build community through truly ground-level reporting of the city’s neighborhoods.
In just five years, Block Club has transformed from scrappy startup to one of the most-read news organizations in Chicago by being responsive to the city’s neighborhoods. Our team of 26 full-time journalists publish more than a dozen stories daily from every corner of the city and inform Chicagoans through our neighborhood newsletters, “It’s All Good” podcast, “On The Block” TV show and free, bilingual COVID-19 hotline.
Block Club has been named Editor & Publisher’s Best News Site, LION’s Publisher of the Year, INN’s Community Champion of the Year and we are proudly home to Chicago’s 2021 Journalist of the Year.