Austin Weekly News

Austin Weekly News is a free weekly newspaper covering the Austin, West Garfield Park, and North Lawndale neighborhoods on Chicago's West Side.

The paper was founded in 1986 by Liliana Drechney, a former reporter for the now-defunct Leader Papers chain, and was published from the outset by the Oak Park-based Wednesday Journal. Circulation expanded to cover North Lawndale and West Garfield Park in 2010. In 2019, Wednesday Journal, Inc. became owned by the nonprofit Growing Community Media (GCM), which had launched in 1980. In February 2026, GCM donated Austin Weekly News and its three sister publications to NEWSWELL, a nonprofit affiliated with Arizona State University's Walter Cronkite School of Journalism, becoming the first outlets outside California to join NEWSWELL's support network.

The paper covers West Side community news, schools, policing, violence-intervention efforts, and local government, continuing a tradition of neighborhood newspapers in Austin dating back to the 1970s.

Content is published free online at austinweeklynews.com, supported by reader donations and NEWSWELL's operational backing; historical issues from 1970-1997 are archived at the Chicago Public Library.