Collaborative Reporting Projects

Over the past year, we’ve been collecting information about dozens of collaborative reporting projects involving hundreds of newsrooms around the world. We used that information to identify six distinct models of collaborative journalism, which are based on how long newsroom and information organizations worked together, and how they integrated their work and workflows.

Now, we’re creating a comprehensive database with the information we’ve collected about both those projects and others we don’t know about yet. In the coming weeks, we’re planning to gather as much information as we can about all kinds of collaborative journalism projects from around the world.

The project was inspired in part by this great list Melody Joy Kramer published on Poynter.

The resulting database will include information on:

  • How each collaboration was funded
  • The size of each newsroom involved
  • What tools organizations used to facilitate the collaboration
  • How long each collaboration lasted
  • What the collaboration produced
  • How it fits in with the six distinct collaborative models we identified

We see this database as a resource to help newsrooms and organizations that want to collaborate, as well as those that want to better understand existing projects and how they’ve worked.

And we need your help.

Tell us about your collaborations

So far, we’ve collected basic information on collaborations between more than 500 newsrooms, but there are dozens, if not hundreds, more collaborative projects that have taken place around the world. Click here to add to the list!

If you’ve worked on a collaborative project in a newsroom — or know of one — please let us know by filling out this short form.

We’re working with digital strategist Melody Kramer who will be leading this project and getting the first iteration of the database up and running. (She may be in touch to ask a few follow up questions.)

If you have any questions about the form or the database we’re building, please email [email protected]. There’s also a Slack team where a lot of people who think about collaborative journalism share resources and ideas. Please join us there if you’d like to learn more and participate in ongoing discussions.

What do you mean by journalism collaborations?

There a several different ways to look at collaborative journalism, but we define it broadly as the practice of executing journalistic endeavors using a cross-entity approach.

This encompasses news organizations working together (and with other non-news entities) on reporting projects, partnering on audience engagement efforts, co-collecting and sharing data, or even teaming up to build technology that supports multiple organizations working toward a shared journalistic goal.

Read more:

Journalists around the world are working together more than ever. Here are 56 examples. — Melody Kramer

Report: Comparing models of collaborative journalism — Center for Cooperative Media

Tip Sheets for creating:

Click here to tell us about a collaborative reporting project.