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:

• The Colorado Media Project was launched in 2018 by a coalition of journalists, funders, academics, business leaders, and others in the state who were concerned about the decline of their local news ecosystem. Their work has ranged from facilitating traditional co-reporting and distribution collaborations, experimenting with joint marketing and membership efforts, conducting market research and product development, and researching paths for public funding for local news in the state. This year, it provided support for the launch of the Colorado News Collaborative (CoLab), a collaborative of more than 100 newsrooms working together to “increase capacity (journalism, collaboration, mentorship), sustainability (business models, succession planning, revenue diversification) and innovation (technology, audience, community engagement) in independent local newsrooms throughout Colorado.”
• The Chicago Independent Media Alliance launched last year and now has more than 60 member news organizations. In addition to collaborating on editorial projects, the members fundraise collaboratively (both from individuals and foundations) and work with each other on creating media kits, advertising sales support, and market research.
• The 14 members of the new Neighborhood & Community Media Association of Greater Cleveland all collaborate on fundraising and grant proposals, advertising sales, marketing, hiring, and distribution.
• The Local Media Association has facilitated the creation of several collaboratives, including the Oklahoma Media Center and Solving for Chicago. In addition to editorial cooperation, LMA’s collaboratives often include business transformation components as well, such as growing reader revenue and setting aside an innovation fund (in the Oklahoma effort) to “test and experiment with new business models.”
• And while these types of collaboratives have begun to proliferate in the last couple of years, they’re by no means entirely new! CoastAlaska, made up of seven public media stations, has been around since 1994 and has provided shared operations, including shared financial systems, payroll, benefits, fundraising support, and engineering services. Last year, the stations collaborated on a joint fundraising and marketing campaign.

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.