Conflicts of interest

No one pays McKinley Park Today to cover anything, and no one pays us to skip anything. Money isn’t the only thing that bends coverage, though. Here’s what could bend ours.

I want you to like me

I’d like the people of McKinley Park to like me, probably more than an editor should. Expect us to go easy on nearly everyone: the alderpeople, the businesses on Archer, the person who parks across two spaces on Hoyne. If a story reads soft, it probably is. Tell us at harry@mckinleypark.today, and we’ll run the correction where everyone can see it.

Ward Wise

I’m part of Ward Wise, a Chicago metrics collective that measures how the city’s wards and neighborhoods are doing. Its work powers the numbers on our front page and on McKinley Park Info, and I’d like the collective’s work to look good. That’s a reason to be skeptical when we lean on it. When a story relies on Ward Wise data, we say so. Ward Wise has no say over what we cover or what our stories conclude, and our standards page describes how we keep the two apart.

Mic Check

I also run Mic Check, which surveys how people are doing in cities around the world. Its Chicago wellbeing results compare how Chicagoans rate their lives with the rest of the country. When we cite Mic Check numbers, we’ll say it’s mine.

That’s also a plug. If you want better numbers on how Chicago is doing, take part when a Mic Check survey reaches you, or back Chicago’s census so it can survey more people here.

The tools we use

We pay for the AI tools we use, and their makers have no say in what we publish. How we use AI explains which parts of each story a model wrote and how I check them.