The Seattle Times announced it has added three websites to its News Partner Network. They are Inside Bainbridge, My Everett News and Seattle’s Child. All together, The Times now has forty partners in three categories:
- local news sites, including many neighborhood news sites and the Public Data Ferret, a project of the non-profit Public Eye Northwest
- ethnic media — the Northwest Asian Weekly and Northwest Vietnamese News
- “life blogs” on topics such as activities and hobbies, food and drink, outdoors, health and history.
The Times launched the network in August 2009, with a relatively small grant from J-Lab. At the time there were just a handful of local partners, but they included real online news pioneers such as Tracy Record of the West Seattle Blog, Kate and Cory Bergman of Next Door Media and Justin Carder of the Capitol Hill Seattle Blog.
The network has grow remarkably. I’m unaware of any newspaper in the country that has done as much as The Times to build such a collaborative network. A list of success stories on The Times’ site includes cross-linking to stories, photo swapping, training on topics such as mobile reporting and video editing. It also mentions two collaborative news projects, one on homeless families and the other on graffiti.
The Times says it wants to establish and build cooperative relationships with other news sites. If you have questions or suggestions to include in the network, contact Bob Payne – bpayne at seattletimes dot com, Times editor for partnerships and audience engagement.
The News Partner Network is a prime example of what’s working in the Seattle area news and information ecosystem. Other examples are included in the State of the Media section of the Seattle Journalism Commons. We invite you to submit other examples.
P.S. In the interest of full disclosure, I worked at The Times for 30 years, but all of this wonderful work happened well after I retired in 2008.