When US Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrived in Chicago this fall for Operation Midway Blitz, Block Club Chicago responded. In just three months, our reporters wrote more than 230 stories, chronicling not only the actions of immigration agents but also how Chicagoans adapted and survived this unprecedented time.
I’m Jake Cox, a newsletter intern at Block Club, a nonprofit news organization dedicated to delivering reliable, nonpartisan, and essential coverage of Chicago’s diverse neighborhoods. A few months ago, I spearheaded the newsroom’s immigration news WhatsApp broadcast channel. For those of us on the other side of the newsroom — tasked with refining the ways we connect with audiences and crafting the channels through which Block Club’s reporting reaches people — the raids became an opportunity to retool ideas that could serve our audience in need, and the tool we used was WhatsApp.
Why WhatsApp?
Months before federal immigration agents came to Chicago, I pitched WhatsApp as a tool for connecting our reporting to predominantly Spanish-speaking neighbors on Chicago’s Southwest Side. It stayed on our list of audience projects to explore — and then, as we sought ways to share news about Midway Blitz, it felt like the right time to launch the channel.
WhatsApp was a completely novel product for me in terms of engaging an audience. I knew it was popular, but the scale surprised me: more than 3 billion monthly users worldwide and particularly high adoption among Hispanic Americans, who use it at a much higher rate (46%) than other groups, according to the Pew Research Center. That adoption rate, combined with WhatsApp’s broadcast functionality, made it ideal for launching a distribution channel for Block Club’s immigration coverage.
We used WhatsApp to share short digests of immigration news, including updates from the Broadview Detention Center, ways to support immigration communities, and everything in between. We paired these updates with a complementary photo to draw in readers and give a quick recap of what was happening.
When a reader subscribes to the channel, they receive messages directly on their phone. They can react to what we send, but can’t reply — which allows the focus to stay on the news instead of becoming a group chat.
WhatsApp is a mobile-first platform with a low barrier to entry. It mirrors how many residents already organize: through family threads, group chats, and local broadcast channels, which made it an ideal tool for reaching our audience. While it boasts end-to-end encryption, we were uncertain about promising that level of security to readers. So we didn’t treat the channel as more secure than our other social platforms and only shared news that had already been verified and published on the Block Club site.
The infrastructure was simple by design. You can create a broadcast channel with any WhatsApp account, and any staffer can set one up and add colleagues as admins. At Block Club, we used a newsroom cellphone so the channel wasn’t tied to an individual’s phone number, and created the opportunity for readers to text the newsroom via SMS or WhatsApp. We periodically checked these messages for tips or for readers who needed help joining the channel — but we were careful to treat this as a bonus of the platform, not something that we’d promise to respond to quickly. Editorial staff curated and wrote updates based on available content, then passed them to editors for review before publishing.
Strategy and promotion
Our goals were straightforward: grow the subscriber base and keep the workflow light enough that it wouldn’t burden an already-stretched newsroom. We promoted the channel through our existing newsletters, with a story on the site, and social media.
We scaled our posting frequency to coincide with the updates our news team published. During the height of federal enforcement, we posted daily. As things settled, we published updates a few times a week, depending on the available content. We found that digests of one to three stories paired with strong photography worked best — enough to keep readers informed without overwhelming them, and efficient enough that a single staffer could put together a post in minutes using stories already published on the site.
Results
The channel launched on October 8, 2025. As of early February, it has reached more than 3,200 subscribers — a meaningful number for a local nonprofit newsroom, especially on a platform that we had never considered to be an audience tool. The channel caught the attention of organizations such as the American Journalism Project, Northwestern’s Medill School, and the Knight Foundation, and it was featured in a Reuters report about college students reporting on ICE.
WhatsApp does not provide in-depth metrics. The platform only shows reach and follower metrics for the past 30 days, with no granular data available. Subscribers are anonymous — we can’t see where they joined from or what stories they click on, making it a challenge to refine content. Our best measure of success was subscriber growth and earned media.
What we learned
WhatsApp is a simple tool in practice, so think strategically about the basics. Beyond the analytics gaps, the platform offers minimal options for formatting, layout, or branding — which means the infrastructure you build to support it ends up being critical.
I also made some practical mistakes worth sharing. Once we scaled back from daily posting to a few times a week, I didn’t set up a recurring reminder to post. That sounds small, but when WhatsApp is a more niche part of your workflow, it’s easy for it to slip through the cracks. A simple Slack reminder — something most newsrooms already have access to — would have solved that from the start.
I also wish I were more proactive about monitoring analytics and embedding the channel into our existing analytics infrastructure from day one. Given how bare WhatsApp’s built-in metrics are, having our own tracking in place would have helped us better understand what was driving traffic back to the site. The time constraints of launching during a breaking news moment made that difficult, but it’s something I’d prioritize if I were doing this again.
For any publisher considering a WhatsApp channel, my advice is this: Don’t wait for a crisis to build the infrastructure. We had the idea months before we needed it, and that head start made all the difference when things moved fast. Meet your audience where they already are — not where you wish they were. And don’t overthink it. We started with a WhatsApp account, developed an editorial process for managing content, and curated digests with compelling visuals to drive engagement.
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