More U.S. journalists are being named as collaboration managers; here’s a peek at their job descriptions
Last week, Resolve Philadelphia — one of the most successful ongoing collaboratives in the U.S.—announced that it hired its first collaborative editor.
André Natta was named to the role of Editor for the Resolve Reporting Collaborative’s Broke in Philly project. Natta is a recent JSK Stanford fellow who is leaving The Lenfest Institute for Journalism for the Resolve job. (Full disclosure: He’s also a great friend and partner of the Center for Cooperative Media!)
Natta’s hiring is important for several reasons. It’s significant that Resolve Philadelphia has become sustainable enough to allow for the hiring of a collaborative editor, a job that has been done—up until this point—by Resolve co-executive director Jean Friedman-Rudovsky.
Natta’s hiring also continues a trend: we’re seeing more and more people named to similar roles. By the Center’s rough count, there are likely close to 30 people around the U.S. who have jobs that are centered on managing journalism collaboratives, either in a part-time or full-time capacity. (If you’re one of those people and you aren’t already part of our monthly community calls for collaboration manager, email me and I’ll add you!)
Earlier this year, the Center began collecting job descriptions for these kind of jobs, in an effort to showcase the work being done and to provide a roadmap for other organizations thinking about creating such a job.
Here are some of the job descriptions we collected:
- From Resolve Philadelphia, the Resolve Reporting Collaborative Editor
- From Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting, the Collaborations Manager.
- From WAMU, the Director of Collaborative Reporting.
- From the Center for Collaborative Journalism at Mercer University, the Engagement Coordinator/Reporter (which has a big role in managing their ongoing multi-newsroom projects).
- From the Granite State News Collaborative, the Project Manager/Editor.
- From the Institute for Nonprofit News Amplify Midwest News, the Collaborations Manager.
We’d love to add other examples, so if you manage a collaborative and don’t mind sharing your job description, send it to me! Email murrayst@montclair.edu.
Stefanie Murray is director of the Center for Cooperative Media at Montclair State University. Contact her at murrayst@montclair.edu or find her on Twitter at @StefanieMurray.
About the Center for Cooperative Media: The Center is a grant-funded program of the School of Communication and Media at Montclair State University. Its mission is to grow and strengthen local journalism, and in doing so serve New Jersey residents. The Center is supported with funding from Montclair State University, John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, Democracy Fund, the New Jersey Local News Lab (a partnership of the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, Democracy Fund, and Community Foundation of New Jersey), and the Abrams Foundation. For more information, visit CenterforCooperativeMedia.org.
