ProPublica’s Electionland and European cooperative show how media working together can amplify impact
The Center for Cooperative Media is all about collaborative journalism — we facilitate one of the strongest networks of local journalism organizations in the country — so we’re always on the lookout for ideas that embrace teamwork and sharing among separate news organizations in the public interest.
We’re going to start highlighting particularly interesting such projects in posts on Medium. This week we came across two initiatives in particular that fit that bill perfectly, and we wanted to put a spotlight on them.
The first is ProPublica’s latest venture, dubbed Electionland. The Electionland initiative is being built to monitor and help maintain the integrity of the 2016 elections. Instead of simply focusing on the election results, ProPublica and a coalition of newsrooms across the country will work together in a virtual newsroom to produce stories about voting problems at the polls, in real time.
When the team gets wind of a lead or tip about voting problems at a particular polling place, for example, they plan to forward that information to local journalists (who hail from a variety of organizations) on the ground who can follow up in person. It may sound like a simple, obvious concept to some, but that’s not how journalism usually works — especially when it comes to national stories like a presidential election when news organizations are more likely to compete against each other for scoops instead of working together.
What also gives ProPublica’s effort legs is the strength of the organizations involved— including Google News Lab, WNYC and the USA TODAY Network. This type of coordination is crucial in a world of increasingly atomized and distributed journalism. It’s the same kind of participatory collaboration that we expect to see as a result of our new local/national news partnership project.
We’ll be looking for ways to support ProPublica in this endeavor and we’ll be encouraging our network of local media partners in New Jersey to join in as well.
Meanwhile, a group of newspapers in Europe are working on an election-related collaborative project. Twelve journalists from seven newspapers that are part of the Leading European Newspaper Alliance (LENA) have joined forces to produce special reports and in-depth coverage of the 2016 U.S. presidential elections.
The resulting multimedia content will be published on the websites and social networks of the respective news organizations, as well as in some print editions. The hashtag #EuropeGoesUS will be used by all journalists, and each news org will host an interactive map that will use geolocation to track the journalists and their content.
What’s fascinating about both of these projects is the scale that will be achieved by splitting work up among reporters from different companies who are scattered across a wide geographic area. Readers will benefit because they’ll have easier access to a breadth of content in one place related to each topic, and because the journalism produced in the public interest by such a team of journalists will surely be superior to what they could have accomplished alone.
Have a collaborative journalism project you’d like to share? Let me know. Email amditisj@montclair.edu.
