Keeping Chicago Informed

“To me it’s the equivalent of a college-level class in civics, government, and culture all in one,” he says. “And we’re providing it at no cost to 500,000 people.”

At a time when profit-driven news organizations depend on content that amplifies division and partisanship, the role of independent media has never been more important for providing the objective news coverage that creates understanding and empathy among communities.

“Certainly what’s happened is that media has become more partisan as they’ve targeted audiences in a way that maximizes revenue,” Moog says. “At Chicago Public Media, while we want to generate enough revenue to cover our expenses and serve the public, the mission of independent journalism is more important than any profit motive.

“We aspire to be more objective, fact-based, and representative of the whole community that we serve.”

A focal point of Moog’s tenure at the head of Chicago Public Media has involved finding new ways to inform the public with these objective facts. This has become increasingly vital for a city like Chicago, he notes, which is among the country’s most diverse but also most segregated.

In one of the nonprofit’s signature projects since the Sun Times joined WBEZ, Chicago Public Media created a comprehensive voter guide for the 2022 Illinois general election.

“We had over 700,000 people use the digital voter guide,” Moog says. “We also printed 350,000 copies which we sent to households with the lowest rate of voting in the city.”

A similar venture of educational outreach came in the form of a 24-question quiz that was designed to help voters understand where they stood on particular issues in Chicago’s 2023 mayoral election. “Your results connected you with the mayoral candidate most aligned with your views,” Moog notes.

“We had 100,000 people take that quiz, which out of the 500,000 people who voted is a pretty significant number. It was an interesting example of presenting people with the facts and seeing if you could help them be more informed voters. We’re not taking credit for his ultimate victory, but many people were surprised that they matched with Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson.”

In this way, the mission of Chicago Public Media is connected in a fundamental way to the mission of the University of Chicago, whose founding president, William Rainey Harper, built civic engagement into the design of the University by conceiving it as one of the first research universities in the world to provide higher education and other programming to the public of its surrounding region.

Moog himself, at a pivotal point early in his career, made use of a key component of the University’s professional development offerings by taking classes through the Graduate Student-at-Large (GSAL) program.

Through GSAL, students take for-credit undergraduate and graduate courses at the University as a way to explore different fields, advance their careers, and strengthen their applications for graduate school. GSAL is also strategically used by students as an opportunity to discover new strengths and passions while connecting with world-renowned faculty and fellow students.

“The classes I took proved both inspiring and informative,” says Moog, who as a business development manager at Microsoft in his early twenties sought ways to gain the business knowledge he needed to enter the world of technological entrepreneurship.

“As a bridge that allowed me to explore more strategic business topics, GSAL served me well and set me on the course I wanted to be on, which would involve running and launching different companies.”

“I’m a big proponent of lifelong learning,” Moog adds. “I think it’s really significant that UChicago through the GSAL program gives members of the community access to their world-class faculty and incredible facilities.”

Moog pushes the connection further between these two indispensable Chicago institutions by highlighting a little-known fact: the BE in WBEZ stands for Board of Education. “We were originally owned and housed in the Chicago Board of Education,” he says. “During the Polio epidemic, we even taught classes online through WBEZ.”

Weaving civic mindedness together with technological innovation has been at the heart of Moog’s life and career. “Even when my focus was the Chicago tech community, I spent a lot of time trying to get everyone more civically engaged,” he says. “It’s something I think they’ve done very effectively.”

As traditional legacy platforms have given way to digital platforms, Moog has worked with colleagues across Chicago Public Media to explore opportunities to serve the public better with new forms of storytelling, uses of data and visualization, and interactivity—particularly on the local level.

“I’m very inspired by the importance and the need for high quality independent journalism, particularly local journalism,” he says. “If a media organization like Chicago Public Media can help tell the story of people around the city and the region in a way that gives people greater empathy for each other, that seems like a very worthy and positive mission.”