Collaborative Journalism

Defining Collaborative Journalism

Collaborative journalism is a cooperative arrangement (formal or informal) between two or more news and information organizations, which aims to supplement each organization’s resources and maximize the impact of the content produced. Collaborative journalism is not to be confused with “citizen-,” “participatory-,” “engaged-,” “public-,” or other types of journalism that solicit information from the public or consider interaction with the public a cornerstone practice (though an engagement element may be part of a collaborative project). While collaborative journalism is [Page 347]most commonly thought of as being situated in newsrooms and news and information organizations that belong to the journalism field or the field of professional media more broadly, some collaborations involve other information-producing organizations such as civic groups, libraries, arts and culture organizations, and city halls.

History

In some sense, all journalism is collaborative; there is usually at least a reporter and an editor, and perhaps a photographer, videographer, or visual data person. Moreover, collaboration among reporters or between newsrooms has been practiced in different forms for more than 100 years. One of the earliest journalism collaborations was among the U.S. newsrooms that made up the wires in the mid-19th century; in 1846, six New York daily newspapers joined to form the Associated Press. Historians report that those outlets cooperated in gathering news and splitting the expenses of doing so.

In the 20th century, especially after the advent of the penny papers, competition between outlets was the norm. Yet, even during the height of profitability in the late 20th century, when competition, not collaboration, was the most salient relationship between newsrooms, it was common practice for journalists on the same beat to collaborate by sharing notes, swapping tips, and in general helping each other out. Formal collaboration during that period was most common within an organization rather than between. For example, Cable News Network (CNN) was formed in 1980 and codified intranewsroom sharing—between the national headquarters and its television news affiliates—with CNN Newsource in 1988.

Gannett’s USA Today Network, which gathers content from local newsrooms across the country for packaging in the national edition, was rebooted in 2015 to take advantage of the latest technology for sharing content. There was also sharing between smaller newsrooms and organizations; New California Media (later called New America Media) began developing collaborative reporting projects in the late 1990s as a way to combine the strengths of ethnic media with those of mainstream journalism. At the local level, newspaper chains have been collaborating for decades; small suburban weeklies share content with the large metro paper and vice versa.

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