Welcome To: The Unforgotten Bureau

At Fountain Works' The Unforgotten Bureau (For Social Justice Journalism), we are dedicated to the stories and voices of those whose stories are under-told or altogether missing in mainstream media.

Aug 14, 2024

FountainWorks’ Unforgotten Bureau (for Social Justice Journalism) is a branch of FountainWorks NFP—an independent journalism and media organization dedicated to telling the untold stories of marginalized and underserved African-American communities in Chicago and its mostly Black suburbs. The Unforgotten Bureau is a virtual newsroom founded by John W. Fountain, an award-winning veteran journalist, professor and columnist, through FountainWorks NFP, a 501c3 corporation. Says Fountain, “We must tell our own stories with craftsmanship, passion and purpose.”

“Until the lion tells the story, it will always glorify the hunter” – African Proverb

By John W. Fountain

At FountainWorks, 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 on 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 mantra: Validity, Voice, Vision. 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’re 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. Those projects include the work of Fountain, student-journalists and professionals, and have explored the case of 51 mostly African-American women murdered in Chicago in an award-winning digital project (Unforgotten 51) from which the Unforgotten Bureau was derived; one church’s attempt one summer to save the soul of a murderous city (Invasion of Faith (Also see: Invasion of Faith—A Chicago Story In Pictures); the plight of missing and murdered Black women and girls in Chicago and beyond (Sounding The Alarm); the unsolved mysterious death of Jelani Day (Jelani Day); the plight of the homeless in Chicago (When The City Turns Cold); the murder of young Black men in Chicago in a project called Saving Our Sons; an abridged examination of the impact of the water crises in Flint, Michigan titled, Faces of The Poisoned, and a series of stories about a Little League baseball team about Black boys from one of Chicago’s poorest suburbs titled, The Sweet Season, among others.

The Unforgotten Bureau as a digital news space on Substack and a forthcoming FountainWorks website currently under construction will integrate Fountain’s current and future work as well as work he has previously produced—either independently or as projects in which he has led student journalism teams—under one site. But most importantly, the Unforgotten Bureau will advance some of those areas of coverage with new reporting efforts while also undertaking new project ideas and stories in a wide array of topics that fall under the social justice journalism umbrella. Every subject area that intersects the lives of African-Americans in Metropolitan Chicago is within our scope of pursuit and interest: from poverty and politics to faith, education and child welfare to men’s health, violent crime and even sports.

50 Cent A Word will continue to serve as 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, the National Society of Newspaper Columnists Award, the Chicago Journalists Association’s Dorothy Storck Award, numerous other awards and a Pulitzer Prize nomination. In 2024, 50 Cent A Word Substack and the Sounding Alarm series, which Fountain edited, were Lisagor Award finalists and are also finalists for three NABJ Salute To Excellence Awards.

The Unforgotten Bureau (a new website under construction) as a digital space that will feature larger reporting projects will integrate work Fountain has previously produced—either independently or as projects in which he has led student journalism teams—under one site. Most importantly, The Unforgotten Bureau will advance some of those areas of coverage with new reporting efforts while also undertaking new project ideas and stories within a wide array of topics that fall under the social justice journalism umbrella. Every subject area that intersects the lives of African-Americans in Metropolitan Chicago is within our scope of pursuit and interest: from poverty and politics to faith, education and child welfare to men’s health, violent crime and even sports.

We invite you to join and support us in our endeavor.

Note: Fountain’s 50 Cent A Word Substack will continue to serve as the digital home for his 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, the National Society of Newspaper Columnists Award, the Chicago Journalists Association’s Dorothy Storck Award, numerous other awards and a Pulitzer Prize nomination. In 2024, 50 Cent A Word Substack and the Sounding Alarm series, which Fountain edited, were Lisagor Award finalists and are also finalists for three NABJ Salute To Excellence Awards.

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.

“At the same time, we have a real opportunity to allow students to use and develop their journalistic skills and produce quality journalism of immense benefit by focusing on stories that are under-told or altogether untold while also engaging in invaluable experiential and transformative learning.”

“We have demonstrated not only the ability to fill a critical gap, but also the potential for impact, even as an unconventional but fervent journalistic voice crying in the wilderness. I envision FountainWorks through both the Unforgotten Bureau (for Social Justice Journalism) and 50 Cent A Word, shining a much-needed light, of being a voice for the voiceless, and making a difference.”

There is evidence we already have.

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.

The fact that most of the cases of the 51 were not covered by local news media further made identifying sources akin to finding a needle in a haystack. Yet the team, under Fountain’s leadership, persisted, even through cancellation of in-person classes due to COVID-19 and a national firestorm of protests amid a racial reckoning after the George Floyd killing. The Unforgotten team investigated the lives of the victims, contacted loved ones, conducted extensive interviews, collected images, and created online multimedia portraits of the women whose families we were able to reach. Their main point: These are human beings, they were beloved, and there is power in the telling of their story. Indeed their project was arguably the first news media effort to definitively put a face on the case and to dub it the “Unforgotten 51.”

The Unforgotten 51 project, in addition to being published independently online, was featured in Fountain's Chicago Sun-Times column since 2020, reaching the Chicago metropolitan area in print and a larger regional and national audience online. The project gained regional and national traction with other outlets, garnering a cover story by Chicago’s WGN News. The effort was noted by the Columbia Journalism Review, spotlighted by People magazine, Oxygen, the Poynter Institute, the Global Investigative Journalism Network, Politico, The Grio, the Chicago Crusader newspaper, the Chicago Popo Report, WVON radio’s “Talk of Chicago,” and The Final Call, creating a buzz in other news media outlets and within Black Chicago and beyond. Writes Barbara Allen, of the Poynter Institute: “Thanks to the Global Investigative Journalism Network, last week I read “Unforgotten”: Student Journalists Capture the Stories of 51 Women Slain in Chicago. …I love seeing students this invested in a topic and bringing light to tragedies that are too often overlooked by mainstream media.”

To date, the website has been viewed by more than 100,000 site visitors from more than 19 countries while collectively the independent digital projects Fountain has produced have been viewed, according to the websites’ analytics, by more than 300,000, not including the potential thousands more who have viewed projects, videos and podcasts for which analytics either are not readily available or have not yet been computed. Furthermore, countless others have read stories and columns in print and other publications stemming from these projects. Still, numbers don’t tell the whole story. For how can one truly measure the impact of the solace and hope brought to families of murder victims whose stories until the Unforgotten 51 project had long been forgotten?

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.

Following publication of the Unforgotten 51 series, Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker signed into law in August 2021, three key measures sponsored by Illinois State Representative Jacqueline Y. Collins to help fight human trafficking. “In every way that matters, human trafficking is modern-day bondage,” Collins said then. “We know in Chicago, as reported by John Fountain, that the lives, deaths, and disappearances of Black women receive disparate treatment from those of white women. I hope that fighting human trafficking will help us find some of the Black girls and women who have been missing for too long.”

Three years after the Unforgotten 51 series was published, a Chicago independent digital news organization was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of murdered and missing Chicago Black women and girls. But it was Fountain and his students’ Unforgotten 51 project that unearthed that story and its human face—for the love of journalism and the desire to tell stories that might make a difference. Fountain and his students received the National Association of Black Journalists’ Salute To Excellence Award. More importantly, they won the hearts and praise of victims’ families, advocates, community activists and ordinary Chicagoans for telling a story that had been mostly ignored by the mainstream press. Fountain and his students also were awarded Roosevelt University’s "Presidential Award for Social Justice"

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. What he brings as a journalist to the Unforgotten Bureau is a plethora of experience inside American journalism’s most hallowed halls and his long-demonstrated passion for journalism and storytelling—particularly for mining for those stories on the other side of the tracks where he was raised on Chicago’s West Side.

He grew up there in the North Lawndale neighborhood, where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once lived with his family to bring attention to the plight of Chicago’s poor. About North Lawndale, the Chicago Tribune wrote in its heralded 1985 “American Millstone” series, so named because the Tribune deemed its inhabitants a “permanent underclass” and “millstone” draped around America’s neck: “A new class of people has taken root in America’s cities, a lost society dwelling in enclaves of despair and chaos that infect and threaten the communities at large… Its members don’t share traditional values of work, money, education, home and perhaps even of life. This is a class of misfits best known to more fortunate Americans as either victim or perpetrator in crime statistics.”

Fountain, who was a college student, and married with three children when the Tribune’s reporters and editors painted that single damnable perspective—and who, four years after that series, entered the Tribune’s newsroom as a staff writer—has always asserted that there was even back then another portrait the Tribune and American journalism historically have missed concerning hyper-segregated Black communities. FountainWorks’ Unforgotten Bureau and 50 Cent A Word endeavor to present the other side.

We humbly seek donors willing to support our effort.

More About FountainWorks

FOUNTAINWORKS HAS ESTABLISHED A board of trustees—comprised of distinguished community members and former journalists. The organization has honed its vision, including seeking to develop innovative ways of creating a sustainable model through reader subscriptions and paid collaborations with small print publications. These partnerships will potentially expand FountainWorks’ capacity while increasing the exposure of journalists who work for FountainWorks and also enhance those print publications. Also, FountainWorks has begun constructing a Substack subscriber site for Unforgotten Bureau—in addition to the 50 Cent A Word A Substack—and is seeking funding to create a landing website, separate from, but linked to our news sites. Fountain and his students’ work that he led as social justice multimedia journalism projects at Roosevelt University are examples, in both approach and scope, of the kinds of independent projects FountainWorks will undertake in the future.

Additionally, through FountainWorks, Fountain will continue to conduct his series of community storytelling workshops in Chicago-area communities, focusing on teaching citizens how to tell their own stories, using print and digital tools with possible publishing collaborations, occasional public exhibits of photo and multimedia projects, and public discussion forums.

The Unforgotten Bureau team is led by John Fountain who wears many hats. Among them: project leader, line editor, graphic design and production manager, video and photo editor and multimedia producer; web designer and social media content manager, and business manager in addition to writing stories and other content. The majority of our staff consists of Roosevelt student-journalists and one or two freelance journalists who have worked pro bono, although the vast majority of the editing and production is done by John Fountain.

FOUNTAINWORKS BOARD OF TRUSTEES: Rev. Michael L. Pfleger, Reginald Davis, Stephanie Gadlin, Malik J. Fountain, Teresa White, John Barnes, Hamil Harris.

Email: Author@johnwfountain.com