Block Club Wins National Investigative Award For Midway Blitz Coverage

CHICAGO — Block Club Chicago, a nonprofit, reader-funded newsroom focused on Chicago’s neighborhoods, was honored with a Sigma Delta Chi Award for Investigative Reporting from the Society of Professional Journalists, the organization announced last week.

Block Club’s project “Chicago Under Siege: How Operation Midway Blitz Changed Our City” — which combined investigative, archival and analysis techniques to create a permanent record of what happened in Chicago during Operation Midway Blitz — won the award recognizing excellence in journalism in the online category.

Award judges called “Chicago Under Siege” “urgent, highly sophisticated accountability journalism that blends reporting, media criticism and data analysis with impressive confidence.”

“The reporting is especially strong in showing the gap between official federal narratives and verifiable evidence from body-camera footage, ICE arrest records and court findings,” the judges wrote. “The sourcing is expansive, the visuals and data presentation are highly effective and the reporting demonstrates notable courage and rigor on an intensely polarized subject of major public consequence.”

Building on Block Club’s on-the-ground reporting during the operation, “Chicago Under Siege” investigated 16 key events from the fall’s unprecedented federal immigration enforcement action, documenting the fear people lived in, the ways they sought to organize and resist and the heartbreak they experienced.

Block Club reporters, led by Francia Garcia Hernandez and Madison Savedra, spoke to more than 60 people, reviewed hundreds of pages of records and court documents and watched and analyzed hours of video to bring the project to light. What emerged was that the federal government’s version of events, in ways big and small, did not match Chicagoans’ experiences.

“Chicago Under Siege” and our related coverage of Operation Midway Blitz has also been recognized as a finalist for the Scripps Distinguished Service to the First Amendment Award, as well as a winner of the Richard H. Driehaus Foundation Awards for Investigative Reporting and three Peter Lisagor Awards from the Chicago Headline Club.

Garcia Hernandez, who covers Southwest Side immigrant neighborhoods for Block Club, was honored with the Uplifting Voices Award from Public Narrative and the Nonprofit Newcomer of the Year Award from the Institute for Nonprofit News for her Midway Blitz reporting. Director of Photography Colin Boyle won the LoSAH Center for Hope Community Champion Award for his work documenting the operation.

“Chicago Under Siege” is also a finalist for two Local Independent Online News Sustainability Awards in the Public Service and Community Engagement categories.

Block Club launched in 2018 with eight reporters and editors and has grown sustainably to a staff of 42, publishing more than 32,000 stories and growing to cover dozens of new neighborhoods in that time. The newsroom has been named the Local Independent Online News Publishers’ Business of the Year and Publisher of the Year, Editor & Publisher’s Best News Site, the Institute for Nonprofit News’ Community Champion of the Year and the city’s Best Newsletter six years in a row by the Chicago Reader.