If a news outlet announces a website launch, you might think it’s safe to assume it’s a news website that’s launching. But that’s not what Chicago Public Media has in mind for chicago.com.
Chicago Public Media is already the parent nonprofit of two existing news sites, WBEZ and, since 2022, the Chicago Sun-Times. For chicago.com, though, the news org is teaming up with New_Public, a nonprofit working to reimagine online public spaces, to launch a network of online communities for Chicago neighborhoods. Chicago.com (the enviable domain name was donated by the Chicago Community Trust) will host the network, which will be powered by Roundabout, the local community platform incubated by New_Public over the past year. The partners will launch five neighborhood pilots this fall, and will recruit paid, contract “community stewards” to moderate conversations in each neighborhood.
“This is a community platform, not a news site — it’s like, very much not a news site,” Chicago Public Media CEO Melissa Bell said. “It’s crucial that we don’t think of this as a publishing platform.”
In a challenging national environment for media, Chicago has a relatively rich nonprofit news scene that includes robust neighborhood-level news coverage. But information access, and civic engagement, varies widely across the city’s neighborhoods, according to a civic information needs census of Chicago conducted earlier this summer in partnership with Chicago Public Media.
For a while now, publishers everywhere have been confronting the bleak reality that, with more and more people turning to social media for their news, news websites — like newspapers before them — are at risk of becoming obsolete. But what if a news website could be something fundamentally different? What if it could beat the platforms at their own game and offer people sick of doomscrolling something better and more useful?
Those are ambitious, big-swing questions where “if” is operative; building something different requires real, out-on-a-limb experimentation that could end in failure. But Chicago Public Media is, at the very least, asking those questions with its vision for what chicago.com could be. It hopes to build a participatory community resource that informs everything from where to volunteer, to plans for the weekend, to how neighbors can meet one another.
This vision for a role a local news org can play — a provider of useful local information (not just news) and a space for community conversation — is attracting energy and attention elsewhere, too. Village Media, the Canadian organization Chicago Public Media has pointed to as one model for what it hopes to build, just received $5 million from the Knight Foundation to expand to 15 communities in the U.S. (Chicago Public Media has also cited Front Porch Forum in Vermont, Zetland Media in Denmark, and the Daily Maverick in South Africa as role models.)
Before joining Chicago Public Media in 2024, Bell cofounded Vox, representative now of the heyday of a very different era of the internet, and had connected with some of the people behind New_Public and Roundabout in that past life.
“I think all of us grew up at this time where we were inspired by the opportunity of the internet, and I have seen a lot of the challenges of what has happened to our digital space over the last 15 years,” she said. “When I came to Chicago Public Media, I really wanted to think about not just sustaining and stabilizing the great products that we have with WBEZ and Sun-Times, but really thinking about the future of public media overall. I couldn’t think of better partners than folks who were really focused on how to evolve the next stage of the internet and how we interact in digital spaces.”
Chicago Public Media and Roundabout don’t want to call all the shots on how chicago.com evolves; it’s something they’re explicitly inviting community members to “build with us.” But to understand what the platform’s network of neighborhood communities could look like, it’s helpful to start with the Roundabout pilots that already exist.
Roundabout has a presence in cities including Richmond, Virginia, and Portland, Oregon; the team showed me anonymized versions of its interface. It has many of the hallmarks you picture when you think of a social platform: a feed, posts, reaction buttons. The feed is ordered reverse chronologically, not algorithmically, and can be filtered by topics like arts & culture or pets. There’s a separate, second feed that features posts the community steward has flagged to bring to members’ attention. Posts might be introductions, or events, or requests or offers of help, or steward-posted discussion prompts or guides. There’s also a calendar feature, where users can submit or look for events.
One thing you won’t find: Profiles. The focus is on the shared conversation, not individual members’ digital presence or following, so community members don’t have profile pages.
Reaction buttons on the posts are designed to be “pro-social.” Community members can mark that they’re following a post, or mark it as helpful.
Posts are automatically moderated by an AI-powered tool that checks them against community guidelines, though posters can also flag posts for review by the human steward. Roundabout, and chicago.com, want these community spaces to be places for real conversation, including substantive disagreement. (In an attempt to avoid the toxicity on platforms like Nextdoor, no posts about “suspicious persons” are allowed.)
Stewards aggregate events and other PSAs from Roundabout into a newsletter that non-members can sign up for. Nationally, Roundabout now has more than 6,400 newsletter subscribers and Roundabout accounts in total across its pilots, according to Trei Brundrett, Roundabout’s founder-in-residence at New_Public (and, like Bell, a Vox alum).
This is a digital platform designed to ultimately bring people together at local in-person events. “Our top priority is that people can find what they need and then take that info out into their community,” Bell said. She noted that corporate-owned social media platforms “are typically trying to keep [users] on there as long as possible, in order to show them as many ads as possible. We do not have that incentive for chicago.com.”
For the past year, artist and researcher Liza Pittard has been one of two community stewards for Richmond’s Roundabout community, which includes a little over 1,300 members. (Stewards in Roundabout’s pilot communities are paid by New_Public.) Many of the people she’s seen join, she said, are new to town and looking for connection. She spends about 15 hours a week on her role as a steward, she estimated, though it varies by week and tends to be more when she’s also organizing an in-person event. Much of that time is spent combing other social platforms for events and picking out the best ones so Roundabout community members don’t have to do the legwork of looking in 20 different places.
A big part of her role is “researching and becoming more aware of what’s happening around town,” she said, “and what kinds of conversations people around town are having outside of Roundabout.”
Brundrett sees community stewards as more than just moderators — more like a “really great dinner party host,” he explained, whose role is more proactive than reactive. “It’s somebody who is thinking about, ‘hey, what do I want this to be?’ And they’re inviting people in, they’re setting the tone.”
Brundrett described the early joiners of Roundabout as “barn raisers” — people who are already civically engaged in some form, which might include holding a stake in local life as a local business owner. But he’s also excited about Roundabout’s potential to serve people who might be less civically engaged and are just looking for something to do this weekend.
Roundabout’s team sees these communities as places local reporters can be invited into to listen and build trust — places where they can answer people’s questions and learn what they should be reporting on. Reporters, and reporting, are not central to what Roundabout is; they are components that can strengthen the local community conversation that is central.
The primary unit of information, at first, will be “mostly text-based,” Bell expects. But she hopes chicago.com will grow into something that serves people in their preferred information medium, whether reading, listening, or watching (the landing page features short videos).
Chicago Public Media has not yet revealed which five neighborhoods it will launch pilots for, but said it’s looking for those that represent a diverse geographic, economic, and cultural cross-section of the area. “Our approach has been to find the strongest local moderators with the skills to keep community discussions constructive, safe, and civil, while focusing on areas with a deeply rooted sense of local identity and shared history, which research shows is critical to driving active participation,” Bell said.
When chicago.com debuted in July, the site got more than 1,000 email signups within the first two days; a third of those people weren’t already on the WBEZ or Sun-Times lists.
The goal is to keep chicago.com free to access and support it with a mix of memberships, sponsorships, and donations. “Business model innovation is an important piece of this project, and we’re working hard to develop that, but we can’t share many more details at this time,” Bell said. Chicago Public Media’s publications have faced layoffs and buyouts in the past two years, but last month Bell told the Sun-Times financial projections for 2026 suggest the organization will be “close to break-even.”
Bell hopes chicago.com will appeal to Chicago Public Media’s existing audience while also breaking new ground for them. And she hopes creating a social-media-style, participatory information hub corrects a mismatch in available news mediums and people’s actual information habits.
“We want to make sure that we’re providing [people] that information in a format that creates a daily habit like we used to have when you would wake up and get the newspaper from the front step, or turn on the radio and listen to it on your drive into work,” she said.
“If you think about the idea of a newspaper 30 years ago, it was news but it was also local information — we would look for the movie listings in the advertising section — There was a whole package. You would have letters to the editor. You would have local businesses telling you what was happening that weekend,” she added. “I think that bundle idea is what we are trying to recreate, but just in a format that makes sense for today.”
