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Local Media Needs Security. What Chance the Rapper’s Purchase of Chicagoist Means.

The rapper and Chicago leader, 25, recently announced he bought the local outlet to resurrect it. But nobody should expect him, or anyone, to be local media’s superhero.

Chance the Rapper, who just bought the local news site Chicagoist.Credit...Santiago Bluguermann/Getty Images

Ms. Bellware is a Chicago-based news and culture writer.

In mid-July, the 25-year-old Chicagoan Chancelor Bennett, known to the world as Chance the Rapper, released an unannounced batch of songs for social media and the blogosphere to feed on.

In 2018, this happens all the time in music. But embedded in the lyrics of “I Might Need Security,” the most viral of his four new tracks, was a genuine surprise. He wrapped up a line rebuking bias in local media with a decree: He’s going to own part of it.

“I got a hit list so long I don’t know how to finish/I bought the Chicagoist just to run you racist [expletive] outta business,” he announced midflow. A more standard news release on the same day confirmed the news.

Chicagoist was one of five outlets in the joint DNAinfo-Gothamist network of local news and culture sites that shut down in November after its billionaire owner, Joe Ricketts, abruptly pulled the plug on all of his employees in the face of their unionization efforts.

“A co-worker at Vox Media speculated on Friday that ‘there’s gotta be another billionaire’ who wants to swoop in and be a hero for DNAinfo and the cities it served," wrote John Ness, a former DNAinfo editor in chief, for Recode at the time.

Instead of a billionaire bailout, WNYC and its consortium acquired the Gothamist’s assets in late February. Still, while the titular Gothamist site started publishing again in April, followed by DCist and LAist in mid-June, Chicagoist has laid dormant.

So Chance’s extraordinary purchase of Chicagoist and the promise in his official news release to make it “an independent media outlet focused on amplifying diverse voices and content” was widely hailed as an extension of his hometown hero persona.

Since he first gained fame in 2013, the rapper has been recognized almost as much for his politics and philanthropy as he has for his music. Last year, he donated millions of dollars to Chicago public schools and soon after became the youngest person ever to receive BET’s Humanitarian Award.

But appreciation for Chance’s work often veers into near-hagiography; former first lady Michelle Obama was effusive in her taped tribute for the award show, which BET later titled “Michelle Obama Praises Chance for His Philanthropic Greatness.” That praise was echoed by an overeager Vanity Fair headline posted right after Chance’s Chicagoist purchase, declaring he had “saved Chicago journalism.”

Chance has generally embraced his luminary image: “I’m a sign to my city like the Bat Signal/Young chosen one, golden boy,” he raps in the same song that announced his Chicagoist acquisition.

For a significant crop of observers, however, the excitement over the artist’s investment was tempered by questions about his own touchy relationship with the media.

A heavily cited example was the way Chance’s team used his clout to nudge MTV News into removing an already published, gently critical review of his 2016 tour in MTV News. The following year, his entourage also physically blocked a Chicago Sun-Times reporter from taking his picture at a public City Council meeting on plans to invest in a police training center. Chance reportedly said he wanted his privacy.

The dust-up with the Sun-Times reporter — an offbeat incident involving a high-profile local figure — was exactly the type of story Chicagoist would have picked up. And funnily enough, it occurred just one week after the DNAinfo-Gothamist network went dark.

Now that Chance is the publisher, it’s not clear what he plans to do.

Over a week has passed since Chance’s announcement, and in the absence of an established plan for Chicagoist’s reactivation, there’s nothing but blank space onto which Chicagoans can project our hopes and anxieties.

Now that he owns it, how will he keep it open? To break with Midwestern politeness, will Chance have enough cash on hand to foot the bill, without other investors, if his Chicagoist continually fails to break even? These days, a strictly ad-supported model is doomed to fail, but if Chance elects a subscription model, he’ll need to quickly garner a deeply loyal audience willing to pay for quality content.

How will Chance build and compensate his staff? As optimists have noted, Chicagoist has an incredible opportunity to help local writers of color develop their talent. But that means paying viable salaries and freelance fees and not opposing unionization — problems that have bedeviled online media companies over the last decade.

There’s also the looming matter of how Chance’s connection to the site would affect coverage. He has an array of local business and nonprofit partners, as well as personal relationships with prominent figures like Kanye West and the Obamas, who both have ongoing controversies in Chicago related to their work.

Chance, to his credit, has spoken out against those in his orbit. But without a transparent plan to address conflicts, Chicagoist’s editorial independence would regularly be in question.

And finally, when — not if — challenges mount, will Chance continue to support the site? Look no further than The Denver Post, L.A. Weekly, The Village Voice and, most recently, The New York Daily News to see how moguls invested in a media property with a shaky model, then let it hemorrhage journalists before withdrawing from important beats in the name of saving more dollars.

There’s a lot about Chicagoist that Chance should aim to change. The pre-Chance Chicagoist, where I was a contributor from 2010 to 2012, did not pay for freelance stories until 2015. Even then, the rate was below market — usually less than $80 a post — though the site itself was almost entirely reliant on contributors. That’s no way to build up a roster of locally focused journalists.

Fortunately, there are already news sites covering Chicago the right way, which offer Chance a blueprint for moving ahead. Around town, despite hard times, these outlets successfully balance editorial integrity, a full paid staff and robust reporting with organizational solvency.

Block Club Chicago, conceived by ex-DNAinfo staffers, was boosted by a crowdfunded campaign and is now supported through subscriptions and the blockchain-centered platform Civil. The Triibe, which runs a more lightweight operation, also crowdfunded and is banking long-term growth, in part, on grants.

Outlets doing deep, often expensive, investigative reporting like ProPublica Illinois and City Bureau — a local civic journalism lab where I’m currently a reporting fellow — have heavy investment from deep-pocketed organizations like the Sandler and the MacArthur Foundations.

The best parts of Chicagoist, the ones that Chance would be wise to preserve, were its broad editorial freedom and its focus on niche neighborhood stories that might escape the attention of larger outlets.

Tweeting a tip to a reporter could yield same-day coverage, since there was no ladder of higher-ups through which ideas had to be filtered. That structure facilitated stories like the city’s attempt to slyly raze a predominantly Latino school’s community center over the objections of locals, or Walmart’s use of fake community groups to drum up support during its campaign to gain a foothold in the city.

At 25, Chance has proved he’s incredibly capable as both an artist and a community organizer. Everyone of goodwill in town is surely praying he finds a workable model with Chicagoist. But nobody should be expecting him, or some billionaire elsewhere, to be a superhero.

Superheroes, after all, are a fantasy. In reality, we’ll have to band together to save ourselves.


Kim Bellware is a freelance journalist whose work has appeared in Rolling Stone, The Atlantic, Vice News and Chicago Magazine. For five years, she covered criminal justice for HuffPost.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 23 of the New York edition with the headline: A Rap Hero For Chicago News?. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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