A how-to guide for collaborative journalism projects

There has never been a more important moment for technology platforms and news organizations to work together. Over the past two years, we’ve supported projects in which technology enables cooperation between newsrooms tackling difficult reporting challenges. We believe this helps journalists focus more of their resources and attention to what’s most important to quality journalism: original reporting. We’re proud to be a core partner of three such innovative projects with:

• Electionland — a reporting initiative involving more than 1000 journalists across the United States designed to leverage data and technology to give journalists unprecedented visibility into what’s happening at polling stations across the country on Election Day. You can learn more about our involvement with Electionland in this short documentary.

• CrossCheck — a collaborative verification and fact-checking project with more than 37 newsrooms that brings together expertise from media and technology industries to ensure hoaxes, rumors and false claims are swiftly debunked, and misleading or confusing stories are accurately reported ahead of the French Election.

• Documenting Hate — a national coalition of news organizations, civil-rights groups and technology companies in the U.S. intent on creating a database of reported hate crimes and bias incidents.

In the spirit of fostering more of these reporting initiatives, we’re proud to be supporting the first-ever Collaborative Journalism Summit at Monclair State University, where we — along with our partners at ProPublica, First Draft, Meedan, WNYC, and CUNY Graduate School of Journalism — will be releasing a comprehensive Electionland case study. This 66-page playbook provides a detailed account of how Electionland was conceived, planned, and executed as the teams involved worked to track and cover voting on Election Day in 2016. It also provides tips for those who are hoping to create a reporting project along the same vein. One of the goals of Electionland was to serve as a model for collaborative reporting initiatives across the world, with the case study providing a helpful resource for newsrooms looking to execute similar projects.

You can download the full case study on ProPublica’s site here, and don’t hesitate to reach out to us if you have any questions or big ideas worth exploring.