The Latest: Collaboration holds promise for local news outlets (May 4, 2020)
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THE NEWS
Local news outlets in Colorado, New Hampshire, and Oregon are banding together to expand, share, and cross-promote coronavirus coverage, reports Sara Fischer in Axios.
SO WHAT
As local news outlets struggle with the economic effects of the pandemic, newsroom collaborations — also known as “consortium coverage” or “collaborative journalism” — may be key for survival. Partnerships have always been a way for local news outlets to bolster their newsroom capacities. In the past, these joint efforts allowed newsrooms across the nation to tackle a range of challenging topics, including the rural-urban divide, mobile-home facilities, and climate change. Now, local news outlets are forming consortia to sustain and deepen coronavirus news coverage amid shrinking newsrooms and revenue declines.
For local news outlets, partnerships present access to much-needed resources during the COVID-19 crisis, whether those are journalists, data, or newsroom tools. In Colorado, more than 40 newsrooms are joining together to provide Coloradans with a “sweeping, textured statewide assessment” of the pandemic. Logistically, this includes: delegating leads to newsrooms so as to avoid repetition, tracking developing stories, identifying areas with underrepresented coverage, figuring out ways that a newsroom or journalist can help, and, of course, constant communication via Zoom calls and Slack.
In Oregon, editors from different outlets are agreeing to share information sources and are even considering planning coverage together in hope that doing so will allow for coverage from more angles. Meanwhile, the Granite State News Collaborative, a collective of more than 20 news organizations in New Hampshire, is covering the coronavirus using solutions-focused approaches (read our Q&A with the president of The Solutions Journalism Network to learn more about this method). The GSNC built a survey to gather story ideas from around New Hampshire and so far has cross-published over 100 stories. Even more consortia are coming together in Oklahoma, Illinois, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina.
Such efforts also address the larger issue of repetitive content, a trend particularly exhibited by legacy publications. Media critic Dan Gillmor warned news organizations of this problem back in March, writing that large-name news organizations publishing the same story on the government’s response to the pandemic are doing a “vast disservice to the public.” Gillmor instead calls for deep collaboration and a pooling of resources across news organizations and platforms (an idea he actually first proposed in August 2018) to “give the public the full context, [and] not just the latest examples.”
LOOK FOR
The emergence of more newsroom collaboratives. Over the past year, news organizations have built tools to make collaboration easier. In January, the Associated Press launched AP StoryShare, a tool that allows news outlets to share and republish stories. Last fall, ProPublica also rolled out Collaborate, an open-source tool that lets different newsrooms work on shared datasets. Funders are also interested in this space: In March, the Pulitzer Center announced that it’s funding coronavirus news collaborations.
Also, look for how partnerships affect competition. Some newsrooms, as Jill Geisler points out in a CJR interview, might be resistant to collaboration due to 1) views that powerful partners don’t have much to gain and 2) fears that collaboration compromises publisher branding. That said, although market competition is usually a driver of innovation, a 2008 study suggested the opposite can be true in the journalism industry: sometimes increased levels of competition among media outlets can result in more sensationalism and lower media quality.
