Building from the energy of a MediaShift/UC Berkeley Investigative Reporting Project event, this post-conference conversation sparks exploration of the business side of collaboration in journalism.

What does it take for niche news publishers to make money in the digital world? Whether for or non-profit, what are realistic ways for startup news sites to bring in real revenue? Foundation support isn’t forever. Who or what will support in-depth journalism? And how? Join right in or for background check out the stories…

What does it take for niche news publishers to make money in the digital world? Whether for or non-profit, what are realistic ways for startup news sites to bring in real revenue? Foundation support isn’t forever. Who or what will support in-depth journalism? And how? Join right in or for background check out the stories…

How do startup news publishers make an impact – and make money? Among the many local news businesses there are successes to mimic and struggles to overcome. Who or what will support the continued creation of news and sustain its quality? And how? Jump in to the conversation below! Looking for background? Feel free to…

How do startup news publishers make an impact – and make money? Among the many local news businesses there are successes to mimic and struggles to overcome. Who or what will support the continued creation of news and sustain its quality? And how? Jump in to the conversation below! Looking for background? Feel free to…

As I thought about how to answer this question, it was connected to WHY the collaboration in the first place… so for Chicago Public Media, we are here to create content & therefore collaborate to create content (for broadcast, online, and as live event programming)… it seemed a valuable metric to measure how much content is produced.

Here is more about what we’re measuring and why:
http://www.rjionline.org/blog/measuring-community-engagement-case-study-chicago-public-media

Collaboration has great potential… but it doesn’t address the fundamental fact that the quality of political reporting simply sucks. Reporters are supposed to provide the who, what, where, when and why of a story. When you leave it to the candidates to provide that information, you get distortions designed to win votes, not to inform citizens.

There is simply no shortcut here. Journalists have to work harder, research the facts behind the claims in the quotes they are reporting. Otherwise, they are simply facilitating confusion and disinformation.

Instead of simply playing what one candidate says against the other and calling that a story, I want to see reporters provide investigative value. Contradictory assertions by two candidates leave the voters uncertain as to who is correct and who is incorrect on the facts. It’s the responsibility of journalists to answer these questions after playing the opposing quotes. In many ways, it’s this abdication of substantive reporting for “he said/she said” reporting that motivated the rise of blogs. Citizens got fed up listening to the news and learning no facts behind the quotes. So they started trying to fill [...]

Denise, thanks for sharing the ladder of participation and volunteer activities broken out by time available. Those are super useful! Because the citizen journalism projects we’re working on at Piton are data-intensive, we anticipate having contributors with a broad range of data skills. Creating a data-skills ladder or something similar might be a good way for us to engage users ranging from the data averse to the data savvy. Which brings me to a follow-up question: What are some of the most effective ways of building skills among citizen contributors? I’d especially love to see examples that go beyond simple [...]

this stop motion video and this performance review in comic format). I believe this approach can be carried over into election coverage and inviting the audience into the reporting process.

I know you’ve heard this from me before, Matt, so bear with me, but perhaps for the benefit of others: When I was at The Rapidian, a pure citizen journalism news source in Grand Rapids, MI, we came to the consensus that most people want to participate, but at different levels. We came up with this volunteer page based on time , and we came up with various projects to lower the barrier to creating content on the site (concrete asks, formats, etc.), from

… For them to switch geara to something with a further-out pub date.

To be honest, only a handful of partners seemed interested in these king of colaborations.
As for elections, the most we’ve done is compile partner-coverage links on election nite on ST.com, as part of our election blog. I’d be open to something broader if someone had a plan for how such a collaboration would benefit all of our readers.

It really depends on the tool. We have a number of journalists on staff, which can help us shape how our tools develop (many of those tools are ideas dreamt up by that team, in fact). And we do a lot of trainings on our tools through IRE/APME/etc. So we do gather a lot of feedback. But of course not all of our tools are designed for journalists. And people — even journalists — aren’t always great at correctly identifying what they want versus what they think they want. And other times we might be going for a specific interface [...]

Measuring with any exactness the reach of FCIR’s journalism is one our biggest challenges. We can measure our own website audience, obviously, and there are tools to measure pageviews of our stories on partner sites (assuming their tech people allow us to embed code with the story). But we know many Floridians get our journalism through print editions or radio broadcasts. On our reports, we’re forced to measure our audience with a mixture of specific analytics data and anecdotes. This is another problem for which I don’t see a solution in the near term.

Sorry for jumping into this late, but hopefully I can address a few of the topics that have come up so far. I coordinate our local news network at the Seattle Times. We now have 47 local sites in the network, with 27 neighborhood sites and 20 that focus on specific topics, such as health or gardening. We have had two collaborations in the last couple of years, one about graffiti and another about family homelessness. By collaborations, I mean that the Times and partners that opted to participate shared plans on reporting about the same topic, then published their [...]

@Tom: You say that you look for partner organizations to promote and use the tools, etc. Do you look for partner organizations (especially news orgs) to test the tool and give feedback as you’re developing them? (I think there’s a parallel here in what Michael Skoler said earlier about “By asking and listening, you create a group of people ready and wanting to see the coverage that you do on it.”) Trevor’s point about the dinner table also made me think of a point that Ted Han from DocumentCloud brought up in a conversation we had. He said “news people have [...]

Here’s a question for everyone on the thread and those watching: How do you measure the impact of collaborations? Either afterward, or as you’re evaluating whether to join in on a project?

Teresa Wippel

The main challenge in collaborating via our larger Seattle Times partner network is that we are geographically dispersed over a fairly large area — so there isn’t always an ability to find common ground to partner on election coverage, unless it’s at the state level. The other challenge is just time — collaboration means thinking through the strategy and who will be involved and who will do what. When you are acting solo, you just DO IT!

1a. We had a great relationship with the rocky mountain news and worked with them very closely to develop a first-of-its-kind analysis of families leaving Denver Public Schools. The five-part series titled Leaving to Learn examined why one in four school-aged children in Denver are not enrolled in the city’s public school system and where their families are choosing to go instead. In response, DPS board members and then-Superintendent Michael Bennet published a letter acknowledging, “We will fail the vast majority of children in Denver if we try to run our schools the same old way.” 1b. We’ve also partnered [...]

The parts of this process, imo, are what are you asking people to do, how easy is it for them to accomplish, and lastly, how are you going to gratify them when once they oblige you? I’d like to see more of an effort not necessarily to engage, but to think of how to build a process for collaboration that is pleasant for the user, and gives them something back for participating. A super low tech example of this is Andrew Sullivan’s blog. The only way that users can interact w/ Sullivan and his writers/researchers is via email, but that [...]