New tools power collaborative data journalism with a local emphasis

ProPublica, Reveal, and AP are building infrastructure to support collaborative data journalism with impact

Shortly after running Electionland and kicking off Documenting Hate, ProPublica knew something had to change.

Both projects, which were national collaborative efforts, were behemoths to manage. The sheer amount of data, coordination and management required was too much to keep using hacked-together webs of Google Sheets, Slack and email.

So Rachel Glickhouse, the newsroom’s first dedicated partner manager, lead a team that set out to build an open-source tool that could address all of ProPublica’s needs for large-scale collaborations. Ideally, it would be one place to compile a massive database of tips, add hundreds of users, give partners access to different projects, and allow them to update visual entries. ProPublica hired Brandon Roberts to build it, along with developer Ken Schwencke, who had worked on the previous databases

Introducing 'Collaborate'

Last month, ProPublica released Collaborate, a free open-source tool meant to fill this gap for journalists, data editors, and collaboration managers. It’s based on the database tools ProPublica constructed for Documenting Hate and Electionland, and has been packaged into a single resource available for anyone to use in collaborative projects. The Google News Initiative funded the project.

“There are some existing tools for crowdsourcing and shared spreadsheets, but when you’re working on something like Documenting Hate, you really need a tool that can handle a project in a more encompassing way,” Glickhouse said. “As a project manager, it’s much easier to keep track of everything.”

Interested in building a collaborative reporting project? The Center has a few new tools to help. 

Last week, the Center for Cooperative Media traveled to Cleveland to host a workshop on how to build a collaborative reporting project — and we thought you might be interested in some of the materials we shared.

The workshop stemmed from a Peer Learning + Collaboration Fund workshop we did there in August, and was specifically meant to help participants from Northeast Ohio formulate projects in response to a collaborative reporting project RFP issued this fall by Cleveland Foundation, Akron Community Foundation, The Center for Community Solutions and Knight Foundation.

The workshop focused on collaboration to benefit community, and emphasized thinking about projects that would address critical information needs. We started the day with an exercise about the hierarchy of information needs (a concept and structure that City Bureau debuted earlier this year), then did some story brainstorming and discussed tools that could help build collaborative projects.

To help participants envision the project, we shared several worksheets as well as the documentation behind Stories of Atlantic City. If you're interested in taking a look, you can find all of these items at collaborativejournalism.org/NEOhioworkshop. The Center plans to use these tools in its creation of a larger toolkit for collaboration that it will release in early 2020, thanks to support from Rita Allen Foundation.

The Peer Learning + Collaboration Fund awards another $17K in grants for 2019

In its second cycle of grant-making, the Peer Learning + Collaboration Fund supported peer-to-peer learning for journalists from New Hampshire to Illinois to California.

That includes the $17,000 we awarded over the summer to assist journalists with travel to our “Share + Learn” events with City Bureau and Outlier Media.

The Peer Fund is an initiative to facilitate and accelerate peer learning, relationship building and collaboration among journalists, media makers and communicators in the United States. The Center for Cooperative Media is facilitating the Fund, which is generously supported by Democracy Fund.

And there’s still a lot more to come! (And still plenty of time for YOU to apply!)

Google News Initiative awards funding to several collaborative journalism projects 

A total of 57 news organizations won funding in the latest round of the Google News Initiative's Innovation Challenges, from 16 countries in North America and Asia-Pacific. 

And YAY, several of them are collaborative! Here they are:

• University Radio Foundation will be working on Community News Connect, "a collaborative local news platform that allows residents to partner with newsrooms to strengthen news coverage and amplify diverse voices." 
• Three nonprofit organizations, Wisconsin Watch, Outlier Media, and the Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service, will team up to create News414. The project will cover the information needs of the poorest Milwaukee residents, and produce accountability journalism across sectors. 
• Independent Television Service will begin collaborations with five stations "on local content and civic participation strategies centered on criminal justice issues." This is part of their project to use a new feedback platform for improved coverage, engagement, and support from communities of color.
• GateHouse Media had two projects selected by the Google News Initiative. One will help them to collaborate with local contributors, by building a system through the GeoReporter project, "to help editors easily source contributors of community content, make assignments and electronically pay those contributors in a streamlined digital experience, helping to cover more events in the local community."  

What we're reading: 

• Seven newsrooms across five states are teaming up to create Good River: Stories of the Ohio (Next Pittsburgh) 
• Mother Jones, Type Investigations and Latino USA team up to investigate U.S. Marshals' secretive, deadly detention empire (Mother Jones)
• Journalistic collaboration requires clear rules and organization, say Festival 3i attendees in Rio de Janeiro (Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas)
• One Disaster Away: Ohio Valley ReSource teams up with StateImpact Oklahoma and Mother Jones to launch collaborative climate reporting project (The Center for Public Integrity)
• Reynolds Journalism Institute and the University of Missouri Libraries team up to preserve important news stories, recordings and videos (Reynolds Journalism Institute) 
• Generation Opioids: Student journalists at WVU and GWU teamed up to report on the impacts of the opioid epidemic on children in West Virginia (West Virginia University)
• Philanthropy and collaborative journalism - it's the future! (LinkedIn)