Denver delivers: Key takeaways from the 2025 Collaborative Journalism Summit
A turning point for partnership-driven journalism
The 2025 Collaborative Journalism Summit concluded last month in Denver with a clear consensus: collaboration is no longer an experimental strategy for journalism — it’s an essential practice for creating meaningful community impact.
Hosted by the Center for Cooperative Media at Montclair State University with support from our Colorado-based presenting sponsor, the Gates Family Foundation, the 2025 Summit brought together more than 200 journalists, funders, community leaders, and advocates at the Delta Hotels Denver Thornton for two days of intensive learning, networking, and strategizing around the future of collaborative journalism.
Community impact takes center stage
This year’s Summit was organized around the theme “partnerships with a purpose,” highlighting collaborations that produce positive community outcomes. That emphasis was evident throughout the programming, from keynote presentations to lightning talks to concurrent sessions.
“So many of the conversations were focused on community-rooted collaborations,” said Stefanie Murray, director of the Center. “News organizations now are looking for ways that they can leverage each other’s strengths to directly benefit people they’re trying to serve. Collaborative journalism projects are becoming much more focused on outcomes in general.”
The opening keynote from Wendi Thomas and Ayanna Watkins of MLK50: Justice through Journalism exemplified this community-centered approach. Their Memphis-based newsroom has achieved remarkable tangible impact through partnership, including erasing nearly $12 million in medical debt for impoverished patients and securing wage increases for hospital workers.
Day two opened with an equally powerful keynote from Micah Spain of Appalachia Relief and Jessica Maness of Resilience Relief and Recovery Reach, which demonstrated how journalism served as both an information hub and a community organizer during the crisis response following Hurricane Helene.
Collaboration becomes standard practice
One of the most striking developments evident at this year’s Summit was how collaboration has shifted from innovation to expectation within the journalism field.
“I think fewer people are coming to the conference to be convinced on collaboration, and more are coming to learn new ways of collaborating,” observed Delaney Butler, assistant director of the Collaborative Journalism Resource Hub. “In 2019, some things were still really new to people. I don’t think we’d even need a session like that now.”
Liza Gross, senior advisor to the Collaborative Journalism Resource Hub (and the official MC of the last two Summits), emphasized that “collaboration has become the norm, not the exception” and stressed the importance of meaningful impact metrics in measuring success.
Colorado provided the perfect backdrop for exploring mature collaborative models, with more than 180 news outlets across the state working together on content, community engagement, and capacity building.
Many of these partnerships have been operating for six or seven years, demonstrating the long-term sustainability and evolution of collaborative approaches. The opening panel featuring Colorado news leaders highlighted lessons learned from years of partnership, offering a roadmap for other regions seeking to build collaborative ecosystems that can endure and adapt over time.
Community engagement emerges as a core competency
Throughout the Summit, speakers emphasized that effective collaboration requires genuine community engagement from the outset. News organizations are increasingly recognizing that partnerships with community members and organizations are essential for maximizing impact.
“A collaboration can’t expect to be as impactful with just editorial partners as it can with community partners,” noted Amy Maestas, director of the Collaborative Journalism Resource Hub. “It takes some mindset shift and some creative thinking, but it makes a collab more impactful.”
Sessions featuring The Jersey Bee and Charlottesville Tomorrow demonstrated how civic media organizations are partnering directly with the communities they serve, while lightning talks showcased everything from Spanish-language news collaboratives in Colorado’s Roaring Fork Valley to arts-journalism partnerships in Dallas.
Beyond content sharing: Sophisticated partnership models
The 2025 Summit highlighted how collaborative journalism has evolved far beyond simple content sharing to encompass complex, multi-faceted partnerships.
“Collaborative journalism is also continuing to get more sophisticated,” Murray noted. “Many partnerships go far beyond a simple exchange of editorial content, and we saw that showcased this year.”
Examples included Chicago media outlets using AI and WhatsApp to reach migrant audiences, The Marshall Project creating open-access tools for local newsrooms, and the Granite State News Collaborative developing scalable solutions for story sharing and impact tracking.
The Press Forward plenary session demonstrated how collaboration has reached the funding level, with more than $500 million in coordinated philanthropic investment supporting local news ecosystems nationwide.
Safety and press freedom through collective action
An important focus of this year’s Summit was how journalists can work together to protect press freedom and individual safety. The Summit featured three concurrent safety clinics covering digital security, physical safety, and legal challenges — areas where collective knowledge and mutual support prove especially valuable.
“The doxxing panel made me aware that journalist safety and digital hygiene are more important now than ever,” observed Catherine Devine, 2025 Fellow for Civic Science Media Collaborations at the Center for Cooperative Media.
“Not all password managers are created equal,” Devine added. “Googling your name using search engines that you don’t typically use can be helpful when it comes to finding new information about yourself on the web.”
Looking ahead: Collaboration as journalism’s future
The overwhelming message from the 2025 Summit was that collaboration represents not just a survival strategy but the pathway to journalism’s sustainable future.
“Collaboration is not optional in the future of journalism,” Devine emphasized.
The launch of the Collaborative Journalism Resource Hub during the Summit provided attendees with ongoing support and resources for developing their own partnerships, while the diverse array of models showcased throughout the event offered multiple pathways for implementation.
As Summit attendees returned to their newsrooms and communities, they carried with them practical tools, tested strategies, and expanded networks for creating the kind of impactful, community-centered journalism that collaborative approaches make possible.
The 2025 Collaborative Journalism Summit reinforced that the field has reached a tipping point. Partnership-driven journalism isn’t the future — it’s the present, and news organizations that embrace collaborative approaches are already seeing the transformational results.
Joe Amditis is the assistant director of operations at the Center for Cooperative Media at Montclair State University. Contact him at amditisj@montclair.edu or on Twitter at @jsamditis.
The 2025 Collaborative Journalism Summit was organized by the Center for Cooperative Media at Montclair State University, made possible with generous support from our presenting sponsor, the Gates Family Foundation. Additional sponsors included the Reynolds Journalism Institute, Inasmuch Foundation, Democracy Fund, Knight Foundation, Lenfest Institute, American Press Institute, Colorado News Collaborative, Colorado Press Association, 100 Days of Dignity, and Broadstreet.
About the Center for Cooperative Media: The Center is a primarily grant-funded program of the School of Communication and Media at Montclair State University. Its mission is to grow and strengthen local journalism and support an informed society in New Jersey and beyond. The Center is supported with funding from Montclair State University, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, Democracy Fund, the New Jersey Civic Information Consortium, the Independence Public Media Foundation, Rita Allen Foundation, Inasmuch Foundation, and John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. For more information, visit centerforcooperativemedia.org.
