Collaborations expand from newsrooms to the business side

“Business-side and operations collaborations have the potential to be revolutionary for how we think about the sustainability of local news organizations, and for how we think about what a local news ecosystem can be.”

One crucial movement in journalism over the past few years has been the rise of collaborations. Like the rise of nonprofit news, the increasingly collaborative approach and ethos of news organizations signal a fundamental shift toward journalism as a public good. The Center for Cooperative Media has tracked over 400 collaborations in the past few years, speaking to the explosion of this movement; the vast majority have been purely editorial, most often involving shared reporting and publishing.

But the field is starting to see a different type of collaboration emerge, especially at the local level: collaborations centered on local news organizations’ business sides, focused on the development and strengthening of revenue streams and operations capacity — all with a goal of building more robust and sustainable local news ecosystems that are ultimately better able to meet communities’ information needs for the long-term future.

Several recent examples are worth learning from:

This movement will no doubt continue to evolve in the coming months and years, and we’ll see more local news organizations — and the business teams within them — come together to take advantage of efficiencies like shared backend services and economies of scale (while staying fully local, independent, and mission-oriented).

But what’s truly exciting about this shift is that it’s a step beyond editorial-only collaborations to more deeply ingrain together outlets within a local news ecosystem. Business-side and operations collaborations have the potential to be revolutionary for how we think about the sustainability of local news organizations, and for how we think about what a local news ecosystem can be.

Gonzalo del Peon is an associate for strategy and startups at the American Journalism Project.

One crucial movement in journalism over the past few years has been the rise of collaborations. Like the rise of nonprofit news, the increasingly collaborative approach and ethos of news organizations signal a fundamental shift toward journalism as a public good. The Center for Cooperative Media has tracked over 400 collaborations in the past few years, speaking to the explosion of this movement; the vast majority have been purely editorial, most often involving shared reporting and publishing.

But the field is starting to see a different type of collaboration emerge, especially at the local level: collaborations centered on local news organizations’ business sides, focused on the development and strengthening of revenue streams and operations capacity — all with a goal of building more robust and sustainable local news ecosystems that are ultimately better able to meet communities’ information needs for the long-term future.

Several recent examples are worth learning from:

This movement will no doubt continue to evolve in the coming months and years, and we’ll see more local news organizations — and the business teams within them — come together to take advantage of efficiencies like shared backend services and economies of scale (while staying fully local, independent, and mission-oriented).

But what’s truly exciting about this shift is that it’s a step beyond editorial-only collaborations to more deeply ingrain together outlets within a local news ecosystem. Business-side and operations collaborations have the potential to be revolutionary for how we think about the sustainability of local news organizations, and for how we think about what a local news ecosystem can be.

Gonzalo del Peon is an associate for strategy and startups at the American Journalism Project.

Sarah Marshall   The year audiences need extra cheer

Laura E. Davis   The focus turns to newsroom leaders for lasting change

Julia Angwin   Show your (computational) work

Marie Shanahan   Journalism schools stop perpetuating the status quo

Kerri Hoffman   Protecting podcasting’s open ecosystem

Nicholas Jackson   Blogging is back, but better

Astead W. Herndon   The Trump-sized window of the media caring about race closes again

Victor Pickard   The commercial era for local journalism is over

Ben Werdmuller   The web blooms again

Renée Kaplan   Falling in love with your subscription

Patrick Butler   Covid-19 reporting has prepared us for cross-border collaboration

Rachel Schallom   The rise of nonprofit journalism continues

Sam Ford   We’ll find better ways to archive our work

Linda Solomon Wood   Canada steps up for journalism

Ashton Lattimore   Remote work helps level the playing field in an insular industry

John Garrett   A surprisingly good year

Rishad Patel   From direct-to-consumer to direct-to-believers

Doris Truong   Indigenous issues get long-overdue mainstream coverage

Ryan Kellett   The bundle gets bundled

Anthony Nadler   Journalism struggles to find a new model of legitimacy

Tamar Charney   Public radio has a midlife crisis

Logan Jaffe   History as a reporting tool

Cherian George   Enter the lamb warriors

Rachel Glickhouse   Journalists will be kinder to each other — and to themselves

Mike Caulfield   2021’s misinformation will look a lot like 2020’s (and 2019’s, and…)

Talmon Joseph Smith   The media rejects deficit hawkery

Raney Aronson-Rath   To get past information divides, we need to understand them first

Cory Haik   Be essential

Sumi Aggarwal   News literacy programs aren’t child’s play

Jessica Clark   News becomes plural

Jeremy Gilbert   Human-centered journalism

María Sánchez Díez   Traffic will plummet — and it’ll be ok

John Davidow   Reflect and repent

Christoph Mergerson   Black Americans will demand more from journalism

Francesco Zaffarano   The year we ask the audience what it needs

Heidi Tworek   A year of news mocktails

Annie Rudd   Newsrooms grow less comfortable with the “view from above”

Zainab Khan   From understanding to feeling

Rasmus Kleis Nielsen   Stop pretending publishers are a united front

Edward Roussel   Tech companies get aggressive in local

A.J. Bauer   The year of MAGAcal thinking

Marcus Mabry   News orgs adapt to a post-Trump world (with Trump still in it)

Michael W. Wagner   Fractured democracy, fractured journalism

Nisha Chittal   The year we stop pivoting

Matt Skibinski   Misinformation won’t stop unless we stop it

Basile Simon   Graphics, unite

Mandy Jenkins   You build trust by helping your readers

Cindy Royal   J-school grads maintain their optimism and adaptability

Brandy Zadrozny   Misinformation fatigue sets in

J. Siguru Wahutu   Journalists still wrongly think the U.S. is different

Hadjar Benmiloud   Get representative, or die trying

Marissa Evans   Putting community trauma into context

Gabe Schneider   Another year of empty promises on diversity

Juleyka Lantigua   The download, podcasting’s metric king, gets dethroned

Burt Herman   Journalists build post-Facebook digital communities

Jacqué Palmer   The rise of the plain-text email newsletter

John Ketchum   More journalists of color become newsroom founders

Nikki Usher   Don’t expect an antitrust dividend for the media

Charo Henríquez   A new path to leadership

Errin Haines   Let’s normalize women’s leadership

Stefanie Murray and Anthony Advincula   Expect to see more translations and non-English content

Ariane Bernard   Going solo is still only a path for the few

Joanne McNeil   Newsrooms push back against Ivy League cronyism

Pia Frey   Building growth through tastemakers and their communities

Danielle C. Belton   A decimated media rededicates itself to truth

Sarah Stonbely   Videoconferencing brings more geographic diversity

Sonali Prasad   Making disaster journalism that cuts through the noise

Jim Friedlich   A newspaper renaissance reached by stopping the presses

Zizi Papacharissi   The year we rebuild the infrastructure of truth

Ernie Smith   Entrepreneurship on rails

Shaydanay Urbani and Nancy Watzman   Local collaboration is key to slowing misinformation

Ray Soto   The news gets spatial

Bo Hee Kim   Newsrooms create an intentional and collaborative culture

Amara Aguilar   Journalism schools emphasize listening

Jennifer Brandel   A sneak peak at power mapping, 2073’s top innovation

Joni Deutsch   Local arts and music make journalism more joyous

Megan McCarthy   Readers embrace a low-information diet

Julia B. Chan and Kim Bui   Millennials are ready to run things

Benjamin Toff   Beltway reporting gets normal again, for better and for worse

Alyssa Zeisler   Holistic medicine for journalism

Steve Henn   Has independent podcasting peaked?

Gonzalo del Peon   Collaborations expand from newsrooms to the business side

Masuma Ahuja   We’ll remember how interconnected our world is

Alicia Bell and Simon Galperin   Media reparations now

Kate Myers   My son will join every Zoom call in our industry

Alfred Hermida and Oscar Westlund   The virus ups data journalism’s game

David Chavern   Local video finally gets momentum

Joshua P. Darr   Legislatures will tackle the local news crisis

Chicas Poderosas   More voices mean better information

Richard Tofel   Less on politics, more on how government works (or doesn’t)

Sara M. Watson   Return of the RSS reader

Hossein Derakhshan   Mass personalization of truth

Meredith D. Clark   The year journalism starts paying reparations

Celeste Headlee   The rise of radical newsroom transparency

Ståle Grut   Network analysis enters the journalism toolbox

José Zamora   Walking the talk on diversity

Jennifer Choi   What have we done for you lately?

Rick Berke   Virtual events are here to stay

M. Scott Havens   Traditional pay TV will embrace the disruption

Jody Brannon   People won’t renew

Anna Nirmala   Local news orgs grasp the urgency of community roots

Robert Hernandez   Data and shame

Delia Cai   Subscriptions start working for the middle

C.W. Anderson   Journalism changed under Trump — will it keep changing under Biden?

Jonas Kaiser   Toward a wehrhafte journalism

Mark S. Luckie   Newsrooms and streaming services get cozy

Tauhid Chappell and Mike Rispoli   Defund the crime beat

Tanya Cordrey   Declining trust forces publishers to claim (or disclaim) values

Candis Callison   Calling it a crisis isn’t enough (if it ever was)

Bill Adair   The future of fact-checking is all about structured data

Rodney Gibbs   Zooming beyond talking heads

Pablo Boczkowski   Audiences have revolted. Will newsrooms adapt?

Moreno Cruz Osório   In Brazil, a push for pluralism

Taylor Lorenz   Journalists will learn influencing isn’t easy

Tshepo Tshabalala   Go niche

AX Mina   2020 isn’t a black swan — it’s a yellow canary

Mike Ananny   Toward better tech journalism

Nabiha Syed   Newsrooms quit their toxic relationships

Jean Friedman-Rudovsky and Cassie Haynes   A shift from conversation to action

Andrew Donohue   The rise of the democracy beat

Francesca Tripodi   Don’t expect breaking up Google and Facebook to solve our information woes

Andrew Ramsammy   Stop being polite and start getting real

Loretta Chao   Open up the profession

Garance Franke-Ruta   Rebundling content, rebuilding connections

Nico Gendron   Ask your readers to help build your products

Tonya Mosley   True equity means ownership

Ben Collins   We need to learn how to talk to (and about) accidental conspiracists

Nonny de la Pena   News reaches the third dimension

Gordon Crovitz   Common law will finally apply to the Internet

Parker Molloy   The press will risk elevating a Shadow President Trump

Cory Bergman   The year after a thousand earthquakes

Ariel Zirulnick   Local newsrooms question their paywalls

Mariano Blejman   It’s time to challenge autocompleted journalism

Brian Moritz   The year sports journalism changes for good

Don Day   Business first, journalism second

Kristen Muller   Engaged journalism scales

Imaeyen Ibanga   Journalism gets unmasked

Natalie Meade   Journalism enters rehab

Mark Stenberg   The rise of the journalist-influencer

Kevin D. Grant   Parachute journalism goes away for good

Samantha Ragland   The year of journalists taking initiative

Matt DeRienzo   Citizen truth brigades steer us back toward reality

Chase Davis   The year we look beyond The Story

Kawandeep Virdee   Goodbye, doomscroll

Aaron Foley   Diversity gains haven’t shown up in local news

Eric Nuzum   Podcasting dodged a bullet in 2020, but 2021 will be harder

Jesse Holcomb   Genre erosion in nonprofit journalism

John Saroff   Covid sparks the growth of independent local news sites

Colleen Shalby   The definition of good journalism shifts

Catalina Albeanu   Publish less, listen more

David Skok   A pandemic-prompted wave of consolidation

Whitney Phillips   Facts are an insufficient response to falsehoods

Jer Thorp   Fewer pixels, more cardboard

Sue Cross   A global consensus around the kind of news we need to save

Tim Carmody   Spotify will make big waves in video

Beena Raghavendran   Journalism gets fused with art

Janet Haven and Sam Hinds   Is this an AI newsroom?