JOURNALISM
Unveiling the Voices of Black Communities: FountainWorks Journalism
“Until the lion tells the story, it will always glorify the hunter” – African Proverb
“We must tell our own stories – unadulterated, unfiltered, unfettered and unapologetically –in our own voices.” —John W. Fountain
About
FountainWorks is an independent journalism and media not-for-profit dedicated to telling the untold stories of marginalized and underserved African-American communities in Chicago and its mostly Black suburbs. Unforgotten Bureau (for Social Justice Journalism) and 50 Cent A Word are branches of FountainWorks NFP
OUR MANTRA: VALIDITY, VOICE, VISION.
Our STORIES
As conventional journalistic narratives, special topics projects, diverse commentary culture and social issues like crime and violence to faith, politics and policy and multimedia storytelling—appear across our online platforms. We cover an array of topics and are dedicated to capturing the stories and voices of those underrepresented or whose stories are under-told or untold and altogether missing from mainstream news media. We focus particularly on stories that necessitate a more investigative, more intimate journalistic project approach, which has waned in recent years amid industry-wide cutbacks.
Our AIM
To be a light that illuminates the stories of Black Chicagoans that fall between the cracks of mainstream news media and that often elude the radar of the local Black press. We seek to contribute to a more diverse, contextualized and nuanced platter of daily American journalism that is essential to a democracy.
The Unforgotten Bureau
We are a virtual newsroom, founded by John W. Fountain, an award-winning veteran journalist, professor and columnist, through FountainWorks NFP, a 501c3 organization. Unforgotten Bureau is an extension of Fountain’s own work and the projects in which he has led his students from conception through fruition as a professor at Roosevelt University, Chicago.
50 Cent A Word
This platform is the digital home for Fountain’s individual reporting projects and social commentary that over the last 15 years alone have won the Chicago Headline Club’s Peter Lisagor Award, the National Association of Black Journalists Salute to Excellence Award, the Illinois Associated Press Media Editors Award.
Why Now
FountainWorks was founded in December 2022 out of John Fountain’s belief that journalism must now be reimagined. John Fountain believes that independent news entrepreneurship, rooted in the fundamental principles of old school journalism, while also utilizing the new school tools of digital technology, are fundamental to democracy.
“Quite frankly, I’ve been doing the work,” Fountain said. “And it only makes sense now to build out a platform, to go full throttle and carve out a space beyond the mainstream news world, a niche, that delves into those societal spaces and places that have too often fallen through the cracks of American journalism. FountainWorks, through the Unforgotten Bureau and 50 Cent A Word, creates a vehicle to move definitively into a news future with clear purpose and declaration.
MAKING A DIFFERENCE
The methodology was simple and transparent. In Unforgotten 51, a year-long investigative undertaking assigned by Fountain and that grew out of his years as a Chicago crime reporter and decades of humanizing those too often dehumanized, the project sought to tell the personal stories of murder victims previously categorized by police as prostitutes and drug addicts. Under Fountain’s guidance, student-journalists spent countless hours—sometimes on Saturdays— searching for the families of victims using databases and traditional tough shoe-leather reporting as many of the cases dated back 15 to 20 years. Fountain was able to secure from a high-ranking unnamed police source a file containing the names and addresses of last known next of kin, which became a working base for potential sources, but was outdated in many instances as many of those listed no longer resided at those addresses.
QUANTIFIABLE IMPACT
Locally, the Unforgotten 51 project on murdered Chicago women spurred directly the subsequent creation of a special missing persons unit in the Illinois Cook County Sheriff’s office, according to Sheriff Tom Dart who requested that Fountain meet with him as well as Commander Dion Trotter who heads their new missing persons unit, and members of his top brass to discuss the Unforgotten 51 project team’s approach and findings. Because of Fountain’s work with the Unforgotten 51, he was invited to be a keynote speaker by Mothers Opposed to Violence Everywhere, an advocacy group for Black women and girls reported murdered or missing. His voice and expertise made him a sought-after source for producers of movies and documentaries like Discovery+ The Hunt For The Chicago Strangler, although Fountain declined interviews, citing their focus on the serial killer rather than on humanizing the victims.
THE UNFORGOTTEN BUREAU & 50 CENT A WORD ARE BORN
Following the Unforgotten project—and inspired by his passion as a journalist for more than 35 years—Fountain decided in 2022 to launch FountainWorks with the hope of expanding his efforts to produce journalism that identifies those issues and stories often missed or neglected by the mainstream press, and that seek to humanize the people and places in marginalized African-American neighborhoods in Chicago and beyond with storytelling that is intimate, insightful and interesting.
A former national correspondent for The New York Times, Fountain is also a former staff writer at the Washington Post and Chicago Tribune, where he was once that newspaper’s chief crime reporter.
