Block Club Chicago Wins LION Publishers’ Public Service Award

CHICAGO — Block Club Chicago, a nonprofit, reader-funded newsroom focused on Chicago’s neighborhoods, was honored with the Local Independent Online News Publishers Public Service Award for the newsroom s coverage of Operation Midway Blitz and its related lawsuits. Local Independent Online News (LION) Publishers’ Sustainability Awards honor excellence in journalistic impact, financial health and operational resilience of independent newsrooms across the country. Block Club s project, “Chicago Under Siege: How Operation Midway Blitz Changed Our City, 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