Stop. Collaborate and Listen
Local and national media partnerships have the potential for impactful journalism
As a journalist, I often think about ways local issues can be seen through a national lens. Lately, I’ve been wondering if the opposite could also work — could national media share their resources with local news to push out meaningful stories and projects? It’s already happening.
Journalists Tasneem Raja from NPR’s Code Switch and Christopher Groskopf, Quartz’s data editor are one example of national gone local. Raja and Groskopf started the site The Tyler Loop in Tyler, Texas alongside local media like the Tyler Morning Telegraph and Dallas-area NPR affiliates reaching the city. Both Raja and Griskopf told Neiman Lab that they saw the opportunity to cover the changing interests of the city in a data savvy way, something that hasn’t been done with coverage of Tyler before. In the midst of bankruptcies and layoffs it seems the collaboration between national and local media has the potential to provide impactful coverage.
In many ways, local journalists on the ground truly understand the communities they serve. I see this firsthand with the media’s ever-changing narrative of Newark. Often times, I find conflicting coverage of the city as being riddled with crime while also being pushed as a tourist destination. There’s a degree of truth in both perspectives but neither is a picture of the entire truth.
“National reporters can’t always understand the nuances of a community or what stories are actually important,” an audience member told Poynter.
But this doesn’t mean that local and national outlets are in two separate worlds. In fact, these kinds of partnerships can help push meaningful work and truth forward. For the non-profit investigative outlet ProPublica, their concern isn’t about page views. They care about their influence in creating dialogue around the issues they cover as a measure for impact in their work.
“The best way to do that is not to do one story on your own — kind of like one and done…it’s to provide other news organizations the tools so that they can write their own stories,” Eric Umansky, ProPublica’s assistant managing editor told Neiman Lab.
My cohort will be contributing to ProPublica’s Documenting Hate project by helping to collect and verify reports of hate crimes for a national database that can be used by journalists, researchers and civil-rights organizations. Since local publications better understand the nuances of their communities, they are better equipped to report on how hate crimes affect their cities on a local level.
Other non-profit organizations have done similar work in this sphere like The Center for Public Integrity, Center for Investigative Reporting and the Investigative Reporting Workshop. These organizations alongside ProPublica were a part of the Associated Press’ content distribution service for non-profit outlets.
According to Neiman Lab, the AP’s project had a tough time getting newspapers to pick up stories. Nonetheless, I think there’s still potential here, especially because both non-profit journalism and local media are steered by public interest. Local journalists are also a part of the communities that they serve, so maximizing impact is critical to gauging the success of their reporting. Regardless of the outcome of AP’s project, it’s critical to strengthen local media presence. One of my reporting professors said it best while speaking at a panel:
“If the local news is the first line of defense, national media is being screwed,” said Michelle Garcia, senior editor for race and identity at Vox.com.
For impactful journalism, collaboration is key. By raising up local platforms, media also raises the voices of the unheard. In the end, whether national or local — that is what journalists aim to do.
Kristine Villanueva is a freelance journalist and a graduate student in the Social Journalism program at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. She can be reached via Twitter at @kristine_ish.
