Building new partnerships for journalism collaborations

Newsrooms have collaborated in ways big and small for more than a century, but the rate and variety of collaborations and their form have increased dramatically over the past decade as news organizations respond to declining resources and increased awareness of the depth and breadth of news and information needs of communities.

The work is getting more complicated with impact that stretches beyond geographies and any single audience group. The reality is that collaboration is increasingly necessary in doing the work of journalism. But no solution comes without its challenges. It’s only natural that what makes collaboration so powerful is often what makes it challenging: people. For us to gain from all the potential benefits of collaboration, we have to do the work of finding people with similar purpose, complementary values and compatible goals who possess the willingness to collaborate, to be open and invested in the relationship building and management of successful partnerships. Most important, we have to do the work of being good partners to others.

This guide is intended to speak to the work of finding, evaluating and committing to partnerships with new partners. It explores what a healthy, equitable and effective partnership with other news organizations or freelancers could look like for you and your organization.

This guide begins at the point where you are seeking partners. But before you actually do so, I respectfully request that you first take an inventory of yourself, your organization and your participating team and evaluate whether you are ready and able to be a good partner to others.

In this series of guides, Angilee Shah has put together an excellent resource, Building equity in journalism collaborations, which I urge you to review. The Collaborative Journalism Workbook contains guided questions that can help with the process of being ready to be a good partner. As a companion to this piece, Collaborative partnerships with non-news partners focuses on the particular aspects of partnering with people outside of newsrooms and how to create the right kind of process for the context you’re working in. It’s our hope that together these guides can help you navigate most kinds of partnership scenarios.

The sections of this guide are divided based on phases, but you can step into it wherever you find yourself already on the path. You may notice that some ideas repeat through the course of the guide. That’s because there are different cycles in regard to stakeholders and experimentation that apply to different parts of the roadmap, and where you join the path will determine how often you see these cycles appear.

The guide is the product of years of research into collaborative journalism as well as interviews with people doing incredible work in this space. As you go through the guide, one thing you may notice is that there are no direct quotes attributed to individuals. This is an intentional decision. As this guide is specific to the nuanced and complicated dynamics between people and politics between organizations, interviewees were not directly quoted to avoid inadvertently creating any misunderstandings in the current collaborative relationships in which those people are participating.

As we know, collaboration can sometimes be one of the more difficult topics to talk about constructively. Unlike other journalistic practices, we’re talking about what it means to work with one another in an increasingly small field. In the “About” section at the end, you will find information about the people who contributed their time and expertise to shape this guide and without whom it would be incomplete.

The decision to collaborate is usually catalyzed by one of two circumstances: you have a project in mind that you want to work on or you have a potential partner (or partners) in mind and want to explore what possibilities might exist. In other cases, collaborators may find themselves coming together in response to a call from an organizing entity or funder.

These likely paths can guide how you can approach building partnerships.

Potential Project

One of the most common entry points to collaboration is taking an idea for a potential project and then developing with, and around, a group of collaborators.

In this scenario the planning work is not unlike the work that goes into thoughtful journalism of any sort: identifying stakeholders, discussing the audience, figuring out what information needs are most valuable to meet, and convening the expertise required to meet those needs. The act of collaborating adds a few additional layers.

When you conceive a project, you might already have an idea of how it should be executed. Before you start approaching partners, it is important to consider what kind of project management situation you are seeking so your potential partners can make an informed decision about whether they want to participate.

Do you want to have a plan and you’re asking potential partners to help execute your plan?

• “This is what we’re doing, here’s how we plan for it to work, do you want to join?”

Or

Are you seeking a more collaborative process in which the project is designed by the partners participating?

• “We want to work on something about X and are seeking partners to develop a project with.”

This determination will help calibrate how much detail to have ready when you approach potential partners. It will help them understand the nature of the collaboration and guide the extent of planning.

I’ll note that either of these scenarios can be the right fit for a project or an organization depending on the circumstances of the collaboration. There are times when it may make sense for your capacity and goals to have a concise and contained process and there are times when you will have the capacity to explore a collaboration that is more open and with more variables. In both approaches, with intentional design, it is possible to ensure a fair and equitable partnership where everyone benefits.

Stakeholders

Identifying a potential story’s stakeholders is an important part of the process of evaluating what audience the work is serving and ensuring that the information needs of that audience are met.

Exploring stakeholders will also help identify people or organizations that could be either potential partners in the collaboration, sources of expertise or participants in the production process.

This is the opportunity to evaluate not only what the story is about, but who it is for and who it will be created with.

Potential Partners

As you gather your list of stakeholders and partners, it can be helpful to see if anyone on your list is known to be collaborative or if they haven’t engaged in an active partnership before.

Something partnership managers say is that the reputation of potential partners matters as they evaluate who they want to work with. You should avoid partnering with organizations or individuals who are known to make the process difficult or charged. No one person or organization is so brilliant that it’s worth making you or your team’s lives miserable. There is no story in the world that can only be reported on by one specific news organization. There are, however, an uncountable number of stories that cannot be fully covered by any one newsroom or journalist.

You’re at the point where you have some potential partners who will consider working together. Now is when you start working out whether you are compatible.

In collaborations that fail, the failure usually happens when the group comes apart for some reason and the project is either never fully realized as planned or is dropped entirely. Perhaps a couple of things get published or broadcast here and there, but it’s not what you had in mind. This can be the result of miscommunication, misaligned goals and misunderstood expectations.

To avoid this outcome, it’s important to understand the goals and values of your partners, what you are asking of them and what they are asking of you.

One of the challenges around figuring out how to work together is that so much of the guidance and textbooks on collaboration out there assume collaboration is internal to an existing organization or inherent in a new organization.

When people collaborate within the same organization, they have the influence of a shared culture, workflows, understanding of the organization’s specific responsibilities to their communities, and institutional priorities. The goals for the institution are the same and they are negotiating for space within their shared capacity. This is a different environment than journalism collaborations between different individuals and organizations.

In a collaboration made up of different organizations, we have different kinds of newsrooms, business models, publishing platforms, engagement styles and audience focus. All of these factors influence how each partner will function in and participate in a collaboration. Being aware of that is an important part in understanding your partners, how to work with them and how to make decisions with them.

Building a cohesive plan for a collaboration requires finding the acceptable balance for contributions, resource expenditure and responsibilities among the partners. While the term negotiation may bring to mind a formal, or even antagonistic process, the real goal is to create the space for partners to advocate for their needs and capacity and find a mutually agreeable set of expectations for participation. This step is particularly essential when there is a significant power imbalance among partners.

Decision making

How decisions are made as a group can influence trust among group members. When you make a decision as a partnership, you are making it as one united group. It’s not enough to step back, let one partner make the call and if it doesn’t work out, exclude yourself from accountability for the outcome.

We’ve all experienced some form of a project with multiple participants where people go along with a decision they don’t agree with and later say something to the effect of “That was their call. I just went along with it.”

When there aren’t clear goals and expectations, it’s easy for us to default to modes of ego and habit in making decisions. Decisions that are not made explicitly or intentionally are often decided by whomever is willing to argue the loudest or longest rather than what’s best for the partners or project.

Part of our accountability to one another in partnerships is to not just go along with things. We need to disagree together. Decide together. And ultimately commit together. Otherwise you will not be building the trust and dynamics that you need to succeed.

While this may sound intense in reading, in reality, you can test-run decision making as partners through small experiments.

To keep this guide focused on the process of finding partners and getting a collaboration up and running, I’m not going to dig into the actual process and workflow of what a small collaborative experiment or your bigger project might be, but fortunately, guides that do explore that in depth already exist.

• Collaborative Journalism Workbook
• Building a toolset for journalism collaborations
• Budget and finance for journalism collaborations

Active feedback cycle

Collaborate with your potential partners on the process itself

Check-in intervals

Check the status of the project and the partners

On-ramp/off-ramps

What does it look like for a partner to exit?

Expansion

If the partnership expands, how does that occur?

The Center for Cooperative Media

The mission of the Center for Cooperative Media is to grow and strengthen local journalism, and in doing so, serve New Jersey citizens. The Center does that through the use of partnerships, collaborations, training, product development, research and communication. It works with more than 270 partners throughout the Garden State as part of a network known as the NJ News Commons, which is its flagship project.

The network includes hyperlocal digital publishers, public media, newspapers, television outlets, radio stations, multimedia news organizations and independent journalists. The Center is also a national leader in the study of collaborative journalism. It believes that collaboration is a key component of the future success of local news organizations and healthy news ecosystems.

The Center is a grant-funded organization based at Montclair State University’s School of Communication and Media. The Center is supported with funding from Montclair State University, John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, 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.

About this guide

Among the research for this guide, interviews with several people were instrumental in synthesizing the different areas of consideration and suggestions contained within.

Candice Fortman is the executive director at Outlier Media and a leading voice on what a more just and equitable future of service journalism should be.

Cole Goins is a journalist and consultant with hands-on experience in collaborations at CIR and brings to the conversation a valuable view of the variety of ways that partnerships can occur.

Andrea Faye Hart is a co-founder and former community engagement director at City Bureau where her work has brought much insight into the relationships and organizing that go into partnerships of all kinds.

Mike Rispoli is the director of Free Press’ News Voices project and offers much wisdom in the realm of empowering and including people in the processes of journalism.

This report is part of a series of six collaborative journalism guides produced in 2020 by the Center for Cooperative Media at Montclair State University, thanks to generous support from the Rita Allen Foundation.

The Rita Allen Foundation invests in transformative ideas in their earliest stages to leverage their growth and promote breakthrough solutions to significant problems.

The guides were also produced in partnership with Heather Bryant, who agreed to update her Collaborative Journalism Workbook for inclusion as one of the six guides in the series.

To learn more about collaborative journalism in general, visit collaborativejournalism.org.

About the Author

Heather Bryant is the founder and director of Project Facet, an open source infrastructure project that supports newsroom collaboration with tools to manage the logistics of creating, editing and distributing collaborative content, managing projects, facilitating collaborative relationships and sharing the best practices of collaborative journalism. She published the Collaborative Journalism Workbook and works with the Center for Cooperative Media to build resources for collaboration. Bryant researches and writes about the intersection of class, poverty, technology and journalism ethics.