Chicago Builds Instead

Every newsroom community strategy of the past fifteen years has run through someone else’s algorithm. Facebook groups, Nextdoor threads, X replies, Reddit: each was a place a newsroom could reach people, and each ended for the newsroom the moment the platform changed its ranking. Chicago Public Media, the parent of WBEZ and the Chicago Sun-Times, is trying the alternative.

The domain is chicago.com, which the Chicago Community Trust bought and gave to the organization. “Public media was built on the simple idea that some civic infrastructure is too important to leave to the market,” Melissa Bell, the chief executive, said at the July announcement. “It’s very much not a news site,” she told Nieman Lab’s Sophie Culpepper in August, which is what makes it a news story.

The design

Five neighborhood pilots launch this fall, built on Roundabout, the community platform developed by New_ Public. Each neighborhood gets a paid steward, a person with training, resources, and decision-making power, sitting where an engagement algorithm would normally sit. The organization is recruiting people it describes as entrepreneurial, social, and high in emotional intelligence.

The choices that follow from that are deliberate. No profiles: the feed is about the shared conversation, so members have no page of their own to perform on. No ranked feed: posts appear in reverse chronological order, filterable by topic, with a second feed of items the steward has flagged. No “suspicious persons” posts, a rule aimed squarely at what Nextdoor became. Automated moderation checks posts against community guidelines; a human steward handles what gets flagged.

Roundabout has run pilots in Richmond, Virginia, and Southeast Portland, Oregon, for about a year. Richmond has a little over 1,300 members and two stewards. Across all pilots, the platform counts more than 6,400 newsletter subscribers and accounts.

It’s very much not a news site. — Melissa Bell, chief executive, Chicago Public Media

Who showed up

Chicago’s numbers are early and the more interesting for it. Within two days of the July debut, more than a thousand Chicagoans had signed up, and a third of them had no prior relationship with WBEZ or the Sun-Times. Whatever the site becomes, its first cohort is not just the existing public-radio audience talking to itself.

That number should be read next to a study published this month in Journalism Studies. Avner Kantor and Sheizaf Rafaeli analyzed nearly a million comments on 6,400 New York Times stories from 2014 to 2022, comparing the Upshot’s data journalism with conventional pieces. Denser, more analytic stories produced sharper, better-sourced conversation, and fewer people took part in it. Emotional stories drew bigger crowds. The researchers call the readers who keep engaging when the material gets demanding a “data elite.”

That is the trade-off a steward will be working by hand: the more substantive the space, the narrower the room. Chicago is betting that a person can hold the door open in a way an algorithm cannot.

What it costs

The organization has not published a budget for stewards, and it should be pressed to. A moderation contract is a line item; a steward is a staff member with judgment, and judgment does not scale the way a ranking function does. That is the expensive way to build a community, and it may be the only way that produces one.

Bell put the institutional logic to Current in July: public media has been a steward of broadcast signals for decades and is now the steward of a newspaper, and it should think of itself as a steward of digital infrastructure too. The question chicago.com will answer is whether a newsroom’s trust can be converted into infrastructure that outlasts the next platform pivot.

This post closes the August edition of Neal Notes, whose theme is what local news is being asked to sell. The three dispatches before it describe things newsrooms are selling; this one describes a newsroom spending. The companion post on Prism News shows what fills a neighborhood when nobody does.

Sources

Nieman Lab (Sophie Culpepper), August 13; Chicago Public Media / WBEZ / Sun-Times press release, August 13; Editor & Publisher, July 8; Current, July 2026; Nieman Lab (Avner Kantor), August 11; Kantor and Rafaeli, “Conversations with Data,” Journalism Studies, doi 10.1080/1461670X.2026.2700623.