Bettina Chang

In 2015, Chang joined local reporters to create City Bureau, a "civic journalism lab" and nonprofit journalism organization geared around inclusivity and collaboration.[7][8][9] She is now executive director.[4][10]

The community newsroom, originally housed south of the University of Chicago campus, was designed for the South and West Sides of Chicago.[11][9] Politico later called it the "J-School of the streets," primarily due to its focus on civic engagement and similarities to community organizing.[9] Among their first investigations was a database of police misconduct.[12]

They also created a system for involving communities in reporting on local government meetings, called Documenters, in which trained community members are paid to take notes and liveblog the event, particularly in light of the COVID-19 pandemic.[13][14] The newsroom also hosts community-wide events centered on stories or topics related to some aspect of the community itself, to educate residents on journalism ethics and standards, public records requests, or other civic-minded topics.[15]

"If people in the highest levels of newsrooms can't accept this basic fact that they've been harming communities of color, low-income communities for a long time, then you're not going to get anywhere,” Chang said in an interview.[16]

Chang spoke about a framework for this type of work in a 2020 TEDx talk.[17] In 2019, the Columbia Journalism Review cited City Bureau and Chang's work as part of the growth of news ways of doing journalism happening in Chicago. The report said Chang and the founders' "willingness to collaborate—to work across traditional boundaries between journalism and to occasionally abandon competition in the face of local journalism’s uncertain future—feels increasingly characteristic of Chicago journalism."[18]