How to build a collaborative project with multiple newsrooms

Lessons learned in building publishing partnerships for a special investigative project.

Being scolded by a man with a heart condition the day after publication was not the outcome I had imagined when I tackled my first collaboration after going freelance.

Miscommunication about expectations almost ruined a perfectly good working relationship.

While I’m proud of the journalism that resulted from that partnership two years ago, I knew there was a better way of getting to the finish line.

The City Press package that appeared in print.

Now, when I partner with someone, I take greater care in managing expectations. Putting expected outcomes as well as roles and responsibilities in writing is a good first step.

And I make sure that I understand their motivations. Don’t assume that a common interest in journalism automatically aligns your goals.

The most challenging collaboration I’ve since managed — Track My Mayor — involved multiple partner newsrooms and freelancers in a number of locations. With support from Code for Africa’s impactAFRICA fund, media partners City Press, The Herald, The Star and HuffPost SA helped us to keep track of mayors’ promises through reporting.

We also built a website to help journalists, NGOs and citizens do promise tracking of their own.

This collaboration delivered a front-page story.

It was a terrific learning opportunity. Here are a few takeaways:

• In newsrooms with a print-centred workflow, be sure to get buy-in and input from the digital team from the outset.
• If a project is published on multiple platforms, think of each package as a separate project — in terms of planning, presentation and promotion.
• It’s tricky to estimate how a project might fare online — particularly if it’s not news driven. But I think it’s useful to have a goal in mind for eyes on your content and engagement with it. It reminds everyone to keep track of performance and ensures that promotion doesn’t happen in a vacuum.
• Newsrooms are stretched. Digital teams even more so. Make their lives easier. For example, I provided suggested Facebook posts and tweets for all projects. In a case where the engagement editor was so busy that scheduling fell through the cracks, I offered to do the scheduling myself.
• The unexpected will happen. Build in a time buffer to absorb surprises — and then double it.
• Don’t find yourself in a situation where you’re able to make publishing deadlines but don’t have sufficient capacity to promote the content. In many ways the work starts after publication.

Find links to all the Track My Mayor collaborations here.

Keen to collaborate? Get in touch.

Code for Africa (CfA) is the continent’s largest federation of data journalism and civic technology laboratories, with labs in four countries and affiliates in a further six countries. CfA manages the $1m/year innovateAFRICA.fund and $500,000/year impactAFRICA.fund, as well as key digital democracy resources such as the openAFRICA.net data portal and the GotToVote.cc election toolkit. CfA’s labs also incubate a series of trendsetting initiatives, including the PesaCheck fact-checking initiative in East Africa, the continental africanDRONE network, and the African Network of Centres for Investigative Reporting(ANCIR) that spearheaded Panama Papers probes across the continent.CfA is an initiative of the International Center for Journalists (ICFJ).