Not Just Child’s Play: CPS students promote local news with the “Kidler”

On a sunny Monday afternoon, after a grueling commute back to Rogers Park from Jones College Prep in Chicago’s South Loop, a high school student dashes into the recently-closed Archie’s Cafe.

The teenager — 16-year-old Tess Lacy  — rushes down the stairs, hair wispy and glasses bouncing across her nose as she weaves her way to the cafe bar. She and the cafe’s owner, Roberta Schmatz, catch up as Lacy sips an iced mocha, reminiscing about when they first met while organizing an event to inform community members about Loyola’s plans for 1234 W. Loyola Ave.

Schmatz said she was immediately struck by Lacy’s inquisitive and enthusiastic energy when they first met in April.

“I just thought you were a force,” Schmatz said, looking at Lacy and smiling. 

Lacy is known throughout the community as the creator of local news publication the Kidler, a monthly local publication which serves Chicago’s Far North Side. The paper has covered everything from a gender-inclusive music camp to a student at Senn High School who was fatally shot. 

Lacy said she started the Kidler in elementary school, using a playhouse near her family’s old apartment on North Wayne Avenue as the paper’s newsroom. She continued to develop the Kidler over the years, allowing the paper’s content to mature with her as she began distributing to more and more neighbors.

Now, she distributes print editions of the paper throughout Edgewater and Rogers Park at The Common Cup, Edgewater Public Library, Rattleback Records and previously Archie’s Cafe. She said approximately 400 people are on the Kidler’s monthly email list. 

Although print editions of the Kidler say it began in 2018, Lacy said the publication is the same one she started as a kid. She said it skyrocketed in 2022 when she covered the 48th ward’s aldermanic election — a tight race won by progressive underdog Ald. Leni Manaa-Hoppenworth. 

“I wrote a news story about how our Alderman was retiring, and I called him and I got a quote and it just worked,” Lacy said. “And then suddenly — suddenly — I just made this very quick transition into being an actual newspaper.”

Since covering the race, the Kidler has ammassed public attention, earning a feature story in Block Club Chicago and scoring press passes to this year’s Democratic National Convention. Lacy said she’s worked to make the Kidler a more collaborative effort, incorporating other public high school students to help redefine what local news coverage can be.

“As young people who are kind of approaching this very institutionalized work from a very decentralized angle,” Lacy said. “We have a real ability to disrupt those hierarchies and really establish each person’s own personal space or personal direction,.” 

Lacy said this expansion proved necessary for the Kidler’s DNC coverage, as she and five other students divided the different speakers among them. Katelyn Nooman, one of Lacy’s peers at Jones College Prep, said she started writing for the Kidler at Lacy’s request, despite not having any journalistic experience. 

Nooman, laughing, said she was surprised by Lacy’s offer as the two had become friends by chance after sitting together in the mornings before class. The 18-year-old said she was startled when one day in May Lacy nonchalantly mentioned the Kidler and asked her to contribute.

Although she was hesitant at first, Nooman said the DNC — her first encounter with on-the-ground reporting — fostered her passion for promoting the voices’ of others and shaped her view of journalism as a form of mobilization. 

“I do feel like it is activism,” Nooman said. “I feel like it’s getting out messages and helping support voices who are trying to be heard, especially with the march on the DNC. I know a lot of people were covering that, but it just felt good to interview some people and put them in the paper and let other people hear their ideas.”

A goal of the paper, Lacy said, is to introduce other adolescents to happenings in the community — a by kids, for kids approach. Dustin Ford, a 15-year-old student at Senn High School and Rogers Park native, said he was not only impressed by how much Lacy writes, but also by how much he learns from her articles.

“Just to know what’s going on in the world I think is great,” Dustin said. “But especially when it’s from local journalism because that’s someone that’s kind of in your shoes.”

Lacy said this kind of engagement with other adolescents in the community is what she hopes to foster with the Kidler, equating it to a cultural “commons.” 

“As long as the work that we’re doing is informing and educating the people who read our paper and helping us grow as a community, as a collective, then the work that we’re doing is good work,” Lacy said.

Lacy said she is often asked — especially by her father — if she’ll ever rename the Kidler since she’s only a few years out from adulthood. Lacy, however, said she thinks the name still fits her mission to create a local paper dedicated to informing and inspiring active young people in the community.

“Those are the people that I want to be reading the Kidler,” Lacy said. “And those are the people who I want readers of the Kidler to become.”