About

A local newsletter that reads the meeting minutes so you don't have to.

The Chicago Signal is a twice-weekly email about Chicago and the suburbs — the Loop out through DuPage, Kane, Lake, Will, McHenry and suburban Cook. It goes out Tuesday and Thursday mornings, and it's free.

Alongside the newsletter we keep a library of plain-spoken guides to living in Chicagoland: where to eat, how the Metra actually works, what a suburb is really like before you sign a lease.

Who's behind it

Sam, who lives in the Chicago area, reads more village board agendas than is reasonable, and has opinions about the Kennedy. He picks what runs, sets the voice, checks the facts, and is the one who hits send. Reply to any issue and it lands in his inbox.

How we source and verify

This is the part most local sites don't put in writing, so here it is:

• Every news item links to its original source. We summarize and add context; we don't launder someone else's reporting as our own.
• Claims get checked against primary sources — the village's own agenda, the state's own bulletin, the restaurant's own website — not aggregator sites, which go stale silently and are wrong more often than people assume.
• Guides carry an updated date, and we re-verify them. If a place has closed or a rule has changed, we fix it and say what changed.
• When we can't confirm something, we say so rather than writing around it. A guide that admits uncertainty is more useful than one that pretends.
• We correct in public. If we got it wrong, the correction goes in the next issue and on the page.

What we leave out, on purpose

No violence, no crime blotter, no fatal accidents. Local TV covers that thoroughly and we'd add nothing except a worse morning. No weather section either — your phone already knows.

What's left is the civic stuff, the absurd stuff, and the extremely specific: what the council actually voted on, which village spent six figures designing a crosswalk, where the good tomatoes are before 9am.

Corrections and tips

Both go to hey@thechicagosignal.com, or just reply to any issue. If your block sees something first, we'd like to hear it.