Q&A: Aldrin Brown on the power of partnerships and collaboration at CalMatters

Aldrin Brown is the vice president of partnerships at CalMatters, a nonprofit newsroom dedicated to explaining California politics and policy.

CalMatters partners with hundreds of journalism organizations across the state and country. In July 2020, Brown was brought in to help CalMatters understand the value of these partnerships.

We caught up with Brown to discuss what he’s learned and how collaboration allows CalMatters to do more than it could on its own.

WF: How did you start thinking about collaborative journalism?

AB: I don’t recall any collaboration when I was a young reporter. I was pretty much a newspaper guy from the mid-1990s through 2010, when we had newspaper wars. I worked in the Inland Empire in California, so Riverside and San Bernardino counties, and then at the Orange County Register.

Collaboration didn’t come along until pretty far into my digital-only career, at places like Patch. We started becoming more and more open to the idea of other content producers moving content through our platforms, and there might be some synergies there, if we weren’t so parochial.

WF: How exactly does CalMatters collaborate?

AB: Well over 400 publications have republished our work with some regularity during the past 18 months. Most of them are big and small publishers across California, but some are national news organizations like the New York Times or Politico, as well as distributors like Apple News.

We also have the CalMatters content sharing hub, which is in beta testing. We’re creating a system so all of our news partners can share content with one another. It’s an internal website that accepts RSS feeds from all members and you can see articles by category, topic, and more filters. This is in response to years of requests by partners for a way to not only consume CalMatters content, but also to share content they’ve produced among the CalMatters partners.

CalMatters also has a California Divide project that’s grant-funded. It involves La Opinión, The Fresno Bee, The Mercury News, The Californian, and The Press-Enterprise. That is a project where we have editors and reporters from each organization who are working collaboratively on projects — they come up with common themes, they release things together.

We’ve run projects like VoteBeat, which is a collaboration of organizations to cover election-related issues, and now we have the College Journalism Network, where we collaborate with college students to report on higher education in California.

WF: What is your role as vice president of partnerships? How do you work with partners?

AB: When CalMatters launched six years ago, we were reliant on existing media organizations to generate credibility and get content out to audiences. Over the years, CalMatters has become better known and we’ve generated more traffic on our own site. There’s been a feeling for the last three years or so that our partnerships need some structure. That’s what I’ve been brought in to do.

When I got here, we set out to answer some questions: What makes a valuable partner? What standards should we have for partnerships? We want to understand our partnerships in terms of reach, how they’re distributing our content, whether they’re embedding it digitally, whether they’re print-only, and so on.

Now, we’ve been able to see the performance of our content from different publishers across the state, which has helped shape our editorial strategy and priorities. One of the more fascinating aspects of this job has been the visibility into some truly innovative publishing and business models. Some local digital publishers that many people have never heard of are driving seemingly outsized traffic.

WF: It might seem obvious that your partnerships with big national distributors are valuable. So why are these partnerships with smaller publishers important?

AB: It gets us to communities in different parts of the state. Those relationships pay dividends beyond just circulation. There’s a stickiness that is generated by the credibility that’s brought to us by being associated with someone’s hometown brand. We’re not just some highfalutin carpetbagger from the city telling someone how to run their county, we are a trusted partner of their hometown publisher, helping to keep you informed.

California is a very diverse state. Journalistic collaborations can be very valuable, particularly when you have organizations that bring different strengths. Central Valley tells a different story than Oakland, for example.

WF: How else does CalMatters try to reach diverse communities across the state?

AB: We have a significant Spanish-speaking population, so we translate our content into Spanish. We work with a team of contractors — Spanish language experts, copy-editors, and more — that go through and check the Google Premium Translate we have to make sure it’s up to quality. Then we publish those on CalMatters en Español, a landing page that’s a repository we promote to Spanish language publishers across the state.

We also send our Spanish language partners weekly content advisories for everything we post on the landing page. We’re seeing pretty significant uptake — La Opinión, the largest Spanish language publisher in California, LA Times in Español, Univision, and many others.

The goal is for anything that comes into the content sharing hub to be translated into five languages — English, Spanish, Korean, Chinese, and Vietnamese. Now that we have a system for Spanish language translation and sharing with partners, we have an understanding of what it will take to expand to more Asian languages, and we fully intend to do that.

WF: Overall, how have you approached your work at CalMatters, and how do you think about the value of collaboration?

AB: Because we’re a non-profit, we set out to do good. Our projects often get funded on that basis — not how we can monetize it. Trying to get the valuable information that we publish out to every nook and cranny of the state — regardless of language, location, or demographics — is doing good.

A role like this is so broad. There’s a certain amount of persistence and consistency it takes to get into and start wrangling all these things together. It’s one foot in front of the other, one day at a time.

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Will Fischer is a journalist covering the intersection of technology and media. He’s worked for Business Insider and New York magazine, and conducted local news research for City Bureau. Follow Will on Twitter @willfisch15 or email him at willfisch15@gmail.com.

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, 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.