Probably a good time to point out that The @ChicagoReporter needs your help to deliver information services like our Illinois ZIP code lookup tool (and to hire someone to come up with better names).

https://www.chicagoreporter.com/donate/  https://twitter.com/OliviaObineme/status/1250211995334385664

Thanks to partners like @unichicago, @wbez, @suntimes, @TheTRiiBE, @BlockClubCHI, and possibly more (I'm still catching up and will shout out more as we see who is embedding!), we're reaching a substantial audience. They need your support too.

Importantly, when we're sharing resources and data like this, anything you can invest in your local news goes so much further. Our traffic was 99% mobile last night, a lot of it coming from the collar counties. So far today, a lot of it has been from the immediate metro.

That means that by sharing across publications, we've all been able to reach to rather different audiences that have a shared need for fundamental information and synthesize their feedback into useful improvements - with more to come. It's not collaboration, it's collective work.

For example: Thanks to @jayohday, who doesn't even live in Illinois, and my colleague @TheVoiceofJosh, we haven't had to worry about fact-checking the historical numbers for weeks. Which means the folks delivering you relevant news where you live can do more of _that_.

There's more: @pauliebe is making the design ~approximately~ 14.3 times better and working through some thorny data issues; @AsraaReports is dialing everything in so it's clear and accurate and making sure those the hidden dimensions of the user experience are on target.

The @ChicagoReporter's editor+publisher @thefuturewasnow has been leading the way. His vision of one-to-one communication channels with our audience and multilingual content has been critical in all dimensions of our reporting, especially using info needs to drive the strategy.