What is the Center for Cooperative Media?

The Center for Cooperative Media is a grant-funded program at the School of Communication and Media at Montclair State University. Our mission is to grow and strengthen local journalism, and in doing so serve New Jersey citizens.

Click here to read a brief history of the Center for Cooperative Media.

In 2017, the Center began building a program around collaborative journalism, tapping in to the community of practice that was springing up around the topic in the U.S. We had coordinated a handful of collaborative reporting projects in New Jersey and actively promoted cooperation as a way to boost the health of local news ecosystems, so taking a lead role in the conversation around collaborative journalism was a natural fit.

We began by organizing the Collaborative Journalism Summit  which took place May 4-5, 2017, at Montclair State University. It was an international symposium on collaborative reporting projects and cooperative news networks. The summit was hosted by the Center for Cooperative Media, presented by Google News Lab and the Rita Allen Foundation, and sponsored by the Democracy Fund, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, Montclair State University and the Rita Allen Foundation (The Center also receives operational support from the Abrams Foundation). It drew 175 people from around the country and included discussions around models of collaboration, pitfalls of partnerships and recommendations on technology as well as keynote presentations by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists about the Panama Papers project and Google News Lab about the Electionland project.

At the Summit we also announced our first open call for funding to support collaborative journalism projects. More than 70 applications were submitted for six grants of $7,000 each.

Additionally, the Center introduced early findings from a research paper identifying and exploring models of collaborative journalism at the Summit. That full paper is expected to be released in September 2017.

The Center intends to continue to support a community of practice around collaborative journalism as one of its flagship programs, which will include building out CollaborativeJournalism.org as a hub of resources, projects, articles and events on the topic.

If you want to know more or get involved, please get in touch! Email [email protected].