Block Club Chicago Wins 2 ONA Online Journalism Awards

CHICAGO — Block Club Chicago, a nonprofit, reader-funded newsroom focused on Chicago’s neighborhoods, was honored with two Online News Association Online Journalism Awards, which honor excellence in digital journalism around the world. Our newsroom won the Gather Award in Community-Centered Journalism and Immigration Reporting categories for “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. “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. 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 vid