Big News: Thanks to grant, The Record will expand to Skokie

The Record North Shore will add Skokie to its coverage area thanks to the newsroom’s acceptance to a national grant program.

The Google News Initiative’s Growth Catalyst Program — designed to help already successful news programs expand geographically and boost audience, revenue and business/operational resources — awarded The Record $150,000 and coaching to enable the Skokie expansion. The Record was one of 14 organizations out of more than 170 applicants to be selected for the program.

Starting in the third quarter of 2025, The Record will begin receiving the funding and a year of consulting and support from Blue Engine Collaborative, which has provided coaching to news organizations since 2016.

“When we make a commitment to cover a community, it’s not something that we do lightly,” Director of Development Ryan Osborn said. “I think it’s a real promise that we want to make to the residents that we’ll be there for the most important stories that impact their lives.”

Osborn said that while the funding is crucial for the plans, he is more excited about the coaching from Blue Engine Collaborative, which met with The Record and other grantees for the first time Wednesday to discuss details on the program.

Ultimately, The Record’s success in Skokie will depend on community support, Osborn said. The Record plans to grow its reader-led revenue over the next few years so that it will be locally sustainable when the grant funds expire.

“Reader-funded revenue is core to our mission,” Osborn said. “Being a nonprofit newsroom, we are only as strong as our supporters in these communities.”

Record Co-Founder and Editor in Chief Joe Coughlin added that to build a sustainable revenue model, you have to earn a community’s trust before you can earn its dollars. Funding from the Google News Initiative will give The Record the platform needed for that opportunity.

Covering Skokie has been a goal of The Record’s for as long as the company has been thinking about expansion, Coughlin said.

According to estimates from the July 2024 U.S. Census Bureau, Skokie has a population of approximately 65,000. But Coughlin said Skokie is a diverse and vibrant community that is underrepresented in Chicagoland’s media landscape.

“We’ll be there every single day, and … we’ll be accessible, we’ll be transparent and they’ll know that they can trust (us),” Coughlin said. “I know that comes with time, and we have to prove ourselves, and we will. But that’s who we’ll be from Day 1.”

Tackling a town the size of Skokie, which is more than double that of Highland Park, The Record’s current largest coverage area, means the newsroom will need more resources and clever partnerships, Coughlin said.

The Record is already in communication with Skokie community members to listen to their news needs and with local businesses about partnership opportunities. The newsroom will also continue to leverage its content-sharing partnership with the Evanston Roundtable, a nonprofit newsroom focused on Evanston, which shares a border, school district and more with Skokie.

To ensure adequate and accessible coverage, The Record also plans to expand its team. This follows the hiring of Samuel Lisec in May 2025 as The Record’s first full-time community reporter who focuses on Highland Park and Highwood.

The Record’s presence in Skokie will mark the seventh community in The Record’s coverage area since the newsroom’s founding in 2020, furthering the nonprofit’s mission to address the dearth of reliable local news in the Chicago suburbs.

When it launched in 2020, The Record covered five towns: Wilmette, Winnetka, Northfield, Kenilworth and Glencoe — communities that founders Coughlin, Martin Carlino and Megan Bernard covered while with their previous, and now shuttered, newsroom, 22nd Century Media. Following the July 4th shooting in 2022, The Record expanded into Highland Park as well.

“Bringing another community a reliable, independent option for news, for their daily news, for their local news, I’m just so happy to do it and to get the opportunity to do it,” Coughlin said. “I’m just excited to do it, to actually get on the ground.”

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