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COMPETITORS TO COLLEAGUES

How collaboration can spur a renaissance of journalism

How collaboration can spur a renaissance of journalism .............

Center for Cooperative Media Director Stefanie Murray’s thoughts on collaboration started with an elevator. She began thinking deeply about the merits of competition and collaboration when she worked as a digital news editor for the Detroit Free Press in 2011. The newsroom was located in the basement of the same building that housed their competitor, the Detroit News, on the third and fourth floors.

“We all came in the same employee entrance in the back, and then you separated at the elevators. If any Detroit News person was seen near the Detroit Free Press entrance… HR would have to get involved,” she said.

Meanwhile, each publication would send about a dozen reporters and photographers to the same event, and each team would produce a similar story.

“And I always thought, is that really serving people here? What if we just coordinated? We would cover double the amount of things. It just drove me crazy,” she said. “You could say this has been something I’ve been thinking about for a while.”

PARADIGM SHIFT

The dynamic between the competing Detroit newspapers was not an anomaly at the time, but perspectives quickly changed, Murray said. Groundbreaking collaborations, new funding streams, the proliferation of nonprofit news organizations and shrinking newsrooms led to a paradigm shift in collaborations that took hold about 10 years ago and accelerated around 2016.

She founded the Center for Cooperative Media in 2016 to grow, strengthen and sustain local journalism, and to drive collaborations to strengthen the news ecosystem. It is a grant-funded program through Montclair State University’s School of Communication and Media in New Jersey.

Today, news leaders are looking for ways to maintain the same quality of work with fewer people and see the value in working with other outlets with complementary resources. A print publication launching a podcast might offer a data journalist’s skills to a radio station, which could provide their own skillsets and equipment, for example. This collaboration model was among the first to take root for regional collaborations of local news organizations.

Part of the change in mindset was because journalists realized their main competitor was social media and other digital communication services, not each other.

“We don’t have a hold on the attention economy anymore. Twenty years ago, news organizations did,” Murray said. “People get news and information from all sorts of different places. And so, if the barrier to collaborating to do really good journalism is competition, that’s a false barrier really in a lot of ways because you’re only holding yourself back.”

She said she recognizes there can be benefits to competition because it “can drive individual performance,” lighting a fire for a journalist “to move faster in the public’s interest,” such as with an investigation or enterprise story.

“But just day-to-day coverage and basic information needs… there’s really no need to feel competitive about those things,” she said.

Meanwhile, organizations like the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists’ Panama Papers showed what was possible with collaborations in 2016, Murray said. The collaboration of 350 reporters from 80 countries worked in secret for one year to expose how the global elite obscure their finances through offshore banking, based on the leak of 11.5 million documents. The reporting resulted in protests, arrests, legal reform and the resignation of world leaders.

After ICIJ and other organizations showed what collaborations could do, new funding streams made them possible. The largest funder is the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which has invested $42 million since 2009 to launch 41 local and regional news collaborations. Other major investors include the Knight Foundation, the Chan Zuckerburg Initiative, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Google News Initiative, the Walton Family Foundation and the Facebook Journalism Project.

Murray said she has also seen a proliferation of nonprofit newsrooms that are collaborative and missiondriven and typically make their content available to republish.

“So, we’ve got business model changes. We’ve got funding. We’ve got these large, really impactful, many times global, collaborations that have led to change in perceptions,” she said.

OKLAHOMA MEDIA CENTER

One of many regional collaborations comprised of local news outlets is the Oklahoma Media Center, managed by project manager Rob Collins and the Local Media Association. Collins said OMC collaborators have found that working together gives them greater access to information and resources, increases their readership and adds depth to their work.

“Collaborations are hard, and collaboration as a concept is difficult. Keep in mind, journalists are taught to scoop and beat each other all the time,” he said. “I believe the Fourth Estate provides public good almost as a utility, like electricity. But I realize that good journalism isn’t enough if people don’t believe it, trust it or financially support it.”

He said he sees the OMC as a way “to amplify bandwidth through experimentation and collaborative partnerships’ and serve news outlets in Oklahoma.

The OMC launched in 2020 and has grown to include 25 collaborators — newspapers, broadcasters and digital

news outlets. It has received funding from organizations including the Inasmuch Foundation, the Walton Family Foundation, the Kirkpatrick Foundation and the Democracy

Fund. The OMC provides training for journalists and resources, including funding opportunities.

Among the OMC’S collaborative projects is “Promised Land,” an examination of the landmark case, Mcgirt v. Oklahoma. OMC collaborators have published more than 400 articles examining the impact on both tribal and non-indigenous residents after the U.S. Supreme

Court decision in 2020. The judgment affirmed that much of eastern Oklahoma, including most of Tulsa, remains reservation land belonging to the Muscogee Nation and that state prosecutors do not have the authority to pursue criminal cases against Indigenous residents on their land.

“On the far end of the Trail of

Tears was a promise,” Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote in the court decision. “…We are asked whether the land these treaties promised remains an Indian reservation for purposes of federal criminal law. Because Congress has not said otherwise, we hold the government to its word.”

The decision left Oklahomans with many questions. OMC’S collaborators wanted to tackle the topic, but they wanted to do it right. To do so, they needed time and resources.

“Every Oklahoman needs to know what the Mcgirt ruling did and how it will change our lives. Everyone. This is an incredibly important topic that nobody really understands. I think this is the kind of topic that OMC was founded for,” Mike Sherman, executive editor of Oklahoma Watch and an OMC collaborator, said in an OMC press release.

The Native American Journalists Association, another one of the OMC collaborators, provided training on ethical coverage of Indigenous issues for journalists working on the project.

For another series, the OMC hired a data journalist with funds provided by the Oklahoma-based Kirkpatrick Foundation to research affordable housing in Oklahoma City.

Collins highlighted a collaboration between competing nonprofit newsrooms, Oklahoma Watch and The Frontier. Both newsrooms belong to the OMC, but the partnership developed organically. A journalist from each news outlet contacted a reluctant source for information, and the source was not inclined to share the same information twice. What started as a “standoff ” between the two competing journalists became a collaboration when they decided to work together.

The project examined how $18 million in COVID-19 relief from the U.S. Department of Education was used in the state. While the funding was intended to help students during the pandemic, $8 million was distributed to families with little government oversight. Some used the funding to buy Christmas trees, gaming consoles, outdoor grills and fireplaces. The article was printed on the front pages of both local dailies,

The Oklahoman and Tulsa World.

The Kirkpatrick Foundation is also funding the OMC to study the Oklahoma news ecosystem, including polling and hyperlocal engagement research in underserved communities and news deserts.

The study’s goals include identifying why Oklahoma residents who are paying for news do so and identifying information that residents who do not pay for news would financially support.

“Once we compile the data, we’ll publish and share a statewide ecosystem report and then drill down into the silos of misinformation to hopefully move the needle with this targeted messaging in Oklahoma,” he said.

Glancing at a quote from Walter Cronkite in his office, he said he remembers a time not long ago when people trusted the news.

“People would watch the evening news, and there wasn’t really debate about if it was fake or not,” he said.

“We had more sense of community, and we’ve had a fragmentation of our information ecosystem.”

“You have to understand that you can do great journalism, but if people don’t read it, and don’t trust it and don’t believe it, then we’re in serious trouble. We need to evolve the industry, maybe in ways they didn’t teach us in J-school,” he said.

“And that doesn’t mean that we change our standards,” he continued.

Today, news leaders are looking for ways to maintain the same quality of work with fewer people and see the value in working with other outlets with complementary resources.

“We certainly need to adhere to full transparency and accountability in our reporting. We need to have clearly marked correction policies to help with our credibility, which has taken a hit. Hopefully, our research will find ways to engage and potentially move the needle with citizens tuning out what we publish, broadcast or produce.”

TO GO FAR, GO TOGETHER

Larry Lee, president and publisher of The Sacramento Observer, belongs to two journalism collaborations.

Word in Black is a collaboration of Black publishers with a mission to “confront inequities, elevate solutions and amplify the Black experience.” Solving Sacramento is a collaboration dedicated to providing solutions to the lack of affordable housing in the city.

“I live by the old African proverb:

‘If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together,’” Lee said. “When you are united and can learn from each other as well as share resources, it makes the lift much more manageable. There’s no getting around the fact that newsrooms of all persuasions have been challenged in the past few years.”

He joked that in the past, the news outlets in the Sacramento collaborative have all “probably had some kind of beef with each other” as market competitors. Now, he said, they see that sharing resources and ideas is beneficial both in sustainability and serving the community.

He said collaborators must check their egos at the door and work for the group’s good.

“I think it is a 21st-century idea to make a collaboration work,” he said. “I’m old enough to know that there was a time when you didn’t want to work with other newsrooms in your market. It definitely requires a new mindset in order to make it work, but I think it’s worth it.”

Collaboration is not just an asset for local journalism, said Andrew Ramsammy, chief content and collaboration officer for the Local Media Association. It’s a necessity.

“Everyone is feeling the impacts of journalism, the economics of journalism, so one can no longer sustain journalism by doing things alone,” he said. “I believe collaboration is the only way forward in journalism and media. To solely venture in today’s world by yourself is a fool’s errand.”

He said outlets should look at others in their market as equals and look for opportunities to help one another, united by a common goal.

“Journalism outfits today who have unused cubicle space or unused recording spaces – that is a literal open door for collaboration. Smaller places should take the opportunity to go to them and say, ‘Hey, I may be small, but I have a lot to offer,’” he said.

Ramsammy said many philanthropic organizations are interested in investing in collaborations, and the opportunities are ripe.

“This should be a period of renaissance for journalism,” he said. “…I don’t know whether or not organizations will embrace collaboration the way they need to, but I will say this: without collaboration, our industry is in peril.”

Murray said news leaders considering collaborations should approach them with a defined purpose.

“It’s not scary,” she said. “It will involve extra work. You need to trust your other collaborators and make sure you do it for a reason and a purpose and sparingly.”

She said that collaboration should be “a tool in the toolbox to achieve a certain end goal” and “a muscle to flex when you need to use it.”

“People like me are not saying ‘Hey, throw down all the walls and just do all your work in partnership with other people,’ because that’s chaos and that’s silly,” she said. “What we’re saying is that collaborative journalism works, it’s impactful, it makes a difference, it’s necessary in our current business climate, it’s necessary in our current societal climate, and it should be in your toolbox.”

Alyssa Choiniere is an Editor & Publisher contributor and a freelance journalist based in southwestern Pennsylvania. She previously worked as a local newspaper reporter for 10 years. She can be reached at alyssa.choiniere@gmail.com.

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