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At a time when trust in media is plummeting and the industry continues to downsize, a bright spot has emerged in the growing use of collaborative journalism.
Over the past year, the Center for Cooperative Media at Montclair State University has been collecting, cataloguing and analyzing collaborative efforts between newsrooms of all sizes. What we found is revolutionary: Millions of dollars are being poured into dozens of collaborative efforts between organizations who sometimes are competitors, and those efforts are producing strong, impactful and meaningful stories that otherwise couldn’t have been done. Cross-publication between entities is then amplifying the reach of these stories, especially thanks to the multiplatform-approach inherent in nearly every modern journalistic effort.
Collaborative journalism has evolved from experiment to common practice.
Our report, “Comparing Models of Collaborative Journalism,” reviewed 44 collaborations involving more than 500 newsrooms, the sum total of which represented $200 million in funding. In our examination of those collaborations, we identified six distinct models of how the collaborations are structured and looked at strengths, weakness and best practices for each.
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Of course, collaborative journalism is not new. One of the earliest collaborative efforts dates to the nineteenth century and the advent of the wires, with the arrangement that became the Associated Press.
But what is new is the breadth and depth of journalistic collaboration, the popularity the practice has gained, and the critical mass that’s being achieved. Collaborative journalism has evolved from experiment to common practice.
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