Wednesday, November 11 at 4:30 in the Sullivan Galleries (7th floor, 33 S. State St.), F Newsmagazine and the Art Institutes's MFA Writing Department are hosting a roundtable discussion about Chicago's burgeoning new literary community. Featuring novelist Kyle Beachy, playwright Chris Bower, blogger Jac Jemc, Assistant Director of the Neighborhood Writing Alliance Mairead Case, Quickies! founder Lindsay Hunter and Featherproof Books founder Zach Dodson. Moderated by MFAW Department head Sara Levine.
— Whitney Stoepel /
Media Thu Nov 05 2009
Gapers Block is one of 12 recipients of Community News Matters grants from the Chicago Community Trust and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, as part of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation's Knight Community Information Challenge. The Chicago News Matters grant initiative awarded $500,000 in grants to non-profit and for-profit organizations to spur innovation and growth of new sources of quality local news in Chicago. Gapers Block is receiving $35,000 to expand our original local reporting, with a priority on stories about underserved communities and issues that affect them.
We're extremely honored to have been chosen to receive this award, which will allow us to begin paying staff members to write feature articles and pay the editorial staff a bit more than we do right now. While we're still far from paying everyone for everything they contribute to the site -- with around 100 contributors producing thousands of posts a year, we'd need a lot more than $35,000 to do that -- it's a great first step toward that eventual goal.
We'll be sharing details of our plans for the grant with our staff and the public soon. In the meantime, we'd like to thank the Chicago Community Trust, the MacArthur Foundation and the Knight Foundation -- and congratulate the other award recipients. This is a very positive day for the future of Chicago journalism.
Read the full news release after the jump.
Continue reading this entry »
— Andrew Huff /
Art Wed Oct 21 2009
Forgive me if this is old news, but I've just discovered the goldmine of videos on CAN TV's website. This is especially exiting because I don't have cable, so I don't get CAN TV on my television, which seems ironic somehow, but whatever. Money doesn't grow on trees.
Anyway, check out the great videos they've got on there. The local events videos are super interesting, and they have a pretty awesome collection of art-related stuff. Like this video documentation of a recent Artists at Work forum about how to make money outside of the white cube.
— Kelly Reaves /
Media Fri Sep 11 2009
Chi-Town Daily News, one of the first and more prominent efforts to create a citizen journalism-driven online newspaper, has laid off its entire staff, effective yesterday.
One of the laid off writers, Peter Sachs, who also writes for A.V. Club Chicago, told that publication that "Geoff told us Wednesday that we were out of money, and that was it," and that the staff would not be compensated for their time in the most recent pay period. That's an unfortunate outcome, but if the organization is out of money, the Daily News had no choice.
While the Chi-Town Daily News is essentially down, it's not out quite yet, and what began there is actually evolving into something new. Here is part of a statement from Editor-in-Chief Geoff Dougherty today:
Continue reading this entry »
— Andrew Huff /
