Reporters can be competitive, hustling past one another for an interview or wary of getting scooped by a rival. But as resources are tight and newsrooms are small, so collaboration — whether working on stories or just learning from each other — is now an important part of what it means to be a journalist in the 21st century.
This takes place everywhere, from document leaks at the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists to collective advertising programs to a recent Pulitzer Prize-winning collaboration between local newsrooms tackling the same issue. Working together requires tools for story sharing and collaboration, as well as helping people coordinate all sorts of disparate nodes around a network.
One example of such a coordinator is Cheryl Thompson-Morton, who since last year has been in charge of coordinating and supporting hundreds of media outlets that are part of the Black Media Initiative, part of the Center for Community Media housed at the CUNY Craig Newmark School of Journalism.
I recently spoke to her about what she says is a willingness and desire from the different newsrooms, which span from larger editorial operations with a national audience to small, one-reporter outlets with a neighborhood focus, to work together, including in sharing high-quality stories across the network to provide.
“After the Buffalo shooting, especially, folks started sharing stories. That weekend there were racially motivated shootings everywhere. One place was Dallas so the Dallas newspaper did a story tying the Buffalo to the shooting at a Korean salon there that same weekend. So they shared that story. There was a story from the Black Wall Street Times on the Tulsa race massacre that similarly got shared because it was timely.” she said.
“It increases the capacity of folks to be able to focus on the stories that they are in a unique position to cover well,” Thompson-Morton added, in addition to allowing newspapers to run a story about George Floyd’s murder from a journalist in Minneapolis rather than hundreds of miles away.
A set of newsrooms in the Black Media Initiative are holding weekly meetings to discuss how they collaborate in more long-term ways, including coverage of the 2022 midterm elections in the U.S. There are also broader conversations about how collaboration can be good not just for the editorial side, a new initiative about product in newsrooms, but also the bottom line.
“One of the things that they want to work together on is figuring out means to collaborate even on the business side. What are ways that we can raise our voice in advertising, what are ways that we can use our collective audience to go to certain advertisers and bring in resources,” Thompson-Morton said.
That idea follows on previous efforts around advertising from the Center for Community Media in New York City, where in 2019 the mayor signed an executive order mandating a percentage of city agencies’ advertising dollars to be spent with community media outlets such as Black media, Spanish-language media, other non-English media, and hyperlocal outlets.
To me, this sort of movement is indicative of the need to look at news, and content online more generally, as valuable for reasons other than its ability to grab someone’s attention for just long enough to serve them an ad. The text on the page matters and the work that journalists do matter, and we need new metrics — for advertisers as well as publishers — that reflect the differences between different types of content online and what they are doing.
Thompson-Morton says that part of her specific desire in working with advertisers is using the power of a collective of hundreds of outlets to create a new perception of community media, and Black media in particular. This would look like attention not just for February during Black History Month or Juneteenth when buyers want a particular ad, but a recognition of the importance that smaller, specific outlets have to their readers day in and day out.
Ideally, she said, “you see the value in our community, and the deep trust that we have with those communities, and value that enough to to pay for it.”
“It’s not a charity. You have to see the value in this type of media and invest in it in a similar way.”
