Partnership instead of competition

Collaborative journalism has brought us amazing investigations. But it is no universal remedy for the problems that journalism is facing worldwide.

For journalists it is not an entirely new thing to collaborate, but against the background of the current technological and economical revolutions, collaborating with each other has become more important for journalists and media outlets than what one would have expected ten years ago. Single journalists and media enterprises start collaborations with potential competitors, several case studies and manuals give insight into diverse practices, workshops and university seminars prepare journalism students for future collaborations.

Ever since the highly acclaimed and multi-award winning Panama Papers publication in 2016, collaborative journalism has become a household name in the profession. The investigation of cross-border offshore activities of politicians, football players and other VIPs, led by the International Consortium on Investigative Journalism, has become a model for journalistic partnerships and projects.

In the past, mostly foreign correspondents shared their sources and information – and often made sure that their supervisors did not hear about this collaboration. Occasionally, a reporter gave information to colleagues of the second press house in town – if her story would have upset the publisher and therefore was not published. Today, media houses share reporters, technical infrastructure such as servers and entire newsrooms, journalists exchange data and research results, editorial staffs agree on the volume and date of a publication.

Since 2010, collaborative journalism has been gradually affecting the entire industry and has certainly not reached its peak yet. But why and how exactly do competitors become partners? Does collaboration fit with every investigation, every journalist, and every editorial team?

With regards of the roots of its development, digitalization certainly counts as one of the most important reasons for the success of collaborations in journalism. Decreasing revenue streams, changing consumption patterns and reduced staff in newsrooms are some of its negative impacts, which make it more important than ever for journalists and media outlets to join forces. On a positive note, digitalisation greatly simplifies communication, in the fraction of a second, across continents and oceans. In addition, it provides unparalleled access to large databases that cannot be analysed and processed without the collaboration with programmers and graphic designers. It enables the distribution of unlimited content to global audiences and the integration of the audience in the processes of news making.

It was the very first generation of data journalists who united journalistic judgment and the ethics of the open source movement. From there, the new understanding of networking instead of competing, of sharing information, knowledge and infrastructure transferred to further areas of the newsrooms – although some colleagues, supervisors and managers are still sceptical and cautious.

As a rule, partners usually are not direct competitors, but serve different markets or thematic niches: Take the example of the network European Investigative Collaborations that brings together renowned media from all over Europe such as the German magazine Der Spiegel or the daily newspaper De Standaard from the Netherlands. Although the network often encourages other media companies to join single investigations before publication, only one media outlet per country is at the core of the network. This strategy minimizes frictions and therefore deserves consideration before creating a new collaboration.

Each collaboration demands high levels of trust, tolerance and patience as well as the investment of money, staff and time: The investigation needs to be coordinated, the communication between all partners must be simple and secure, and all partners must be able to share a fair amount of resources. In 2018, Nicolas Kayser-Bril, a journalist and pioneer in collaborative data journalism, warned against exaggerated expectations, especially from philanthropic donors who have dedicated themselves to the development of journalism: Collaborations would most likely fail if the partners did not share a common goal – be it to improve research through collective efforts or to achieve greater impact through coordinated publication.

However, so far, collaborative journalism is often funded by philanthropic donors, and even established legacy media are developing their collaborations with the support of foundations and other sponsors. Other funding models such as crowdfunding or community funding are not enough to finance even successful media startups such as ProPublica or the Texas Tribune (both USA).

The interest of academic scholars increased with the rise of successful collaborative journalistic projects: In 2014, the Pew Research Center (USA) published a first substantial study and described five case studies which included legacy as well as newly founded media, single journalists and non-profit organisations. The investigations ranged from a one-time cross-border collaboration on child prostitution to a long-term exchange of diverse content.

In 2017, media scholar Sarah Stonbely presented a first categorisation of different forms of collaborative journalism. Stonbely identifies six different forms of collaborative journalism and distinguishes whether a collaboration is a short- or long-term partnership, and whether the teams work separately, in parallel or integrated. Since 2018, the Center for Cooperative Media, that is headed by Stonbely, has been collecting practical examples of collaborative journalism in a steadily growing database.

An analysis of three partnerships in local journalism has been published by the Reuters Institute in April 2019. In Finland, twelve daily newspapers share a content management system and several editors and reporters. In the United Kingdom hundreds of local and hyperlocal newsrooms are supported by the public broadcaster BBC in the framework of the the “Local News Partnerships”. In Italy, the collaboration between a legacy media outlet and two data journalism start-ups shed light on gambling and several other Italian media outlets published their results.

As cross-border research is becoming more important, it is also attracting more interest in scholarly debates, as the recent publication of a special issue of the Journal of Applied Journalism & Media Studies on cross-border journalism shows. Among other things, the collection examines the influence of cross-border journalism projects on the transnationaliation of the public and shows how cross-border journalism can counteract distortions in reporting and promote diversity.

With growing interest in collaborative journalism, more and more manuals and other tools are appearing that aim to ease the difficulties of collaboration between different time zones, languages and cultures. The Northern-American journalist Heather Bryant has drawn from her experiences in public broadcasting in Alaska to develop a manual and a digital platform for journalistic collaborations. The German-Danish journalist Brigitte Alfter revised her manual on cross-border journalism, which was first published in Danish in 2017, and published it in English in 2019. The platform Hostwriter enables journalists to connect and to collaborate with colleagues worldwide. Workshops on collaborative journalism are developed and held in universities and other learning venues – the development of e-learning sessions on collaborative journalism in the framework of the Newsreel project is going to further this current trend.

Building networks and sharing things and knowledge, corresponds to the zeitgeist. However, collaborative journalism certainly is not a mayfly. Because in an increasingly complex world, the demands on the work of journalists are increasing – demands that the proverbial “lonely wolf” can no longer fulfil.

This text was written by Nadia Leihs and first appeared on the German section of the European Journalism Observatory.
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