NJ Sustainability Reporting Hub marks a unique approach to climate collaboration

This week the recently-launched New Jersey Sustainability Reporting Hub announced that it has officially launched and published its first 12 stories.

The NJSR Hub, of which the Center for Cooperative Media is a founding partner, is a unique approach to climate journalism. Its goal is to produce solutions-oriented news and information related to environmental sustainability. It works by recruiting fellows in newsrooms around the state and putting them together in a cohort for the fellowship period.

The content produced by the Hub is available for republication under a Creative Commons license. Recent stories include “Hey, Jersey, Do You Know Where Your Trash Goes?” and “Harsher climate a challenge to New Jersey tomato farmers. Here’s how they’re adapting.”

The Hub joins a (quickly) growing list of collaboratives in the U.S. that are focused on climate or the environment, an area where I expect to see even more growth in 2020.

📘 ICYMI: The successes and lessons learned from Stories of Atlantic City

This week, the Center for Cooperative Media and its partners on the Stories of Atlantic City initiative released a video and full report on the project. It chronicles the unique restorative narrative collaborative reporting project, which brought together city residents with local journalists to tell untold stories. 

Why restorative narrative? Atlantic City has been through a spate of high-profile troubles over the last decade, including a steep economic downturn amid a wave of casino closures.

Restorative narrative is a journalistic method of going deeper into communities that have experienced such trauma to find stories of resilience and strength.

In that regard, Atlantic City was the perfect candidate for such a project. 

📅 Help us build a master list of journalism conferences for 2020

We're (collaboratively) creating a master list of upcoming conferences, summits, and other journalism and media convenings to make sure we don't miss anything important – and we need your help!

Here's everything we have so far: bit.ly/mediaconferences

🌎 Passionate about climate news coverage? Covering Climate Now is continuing and hiring!

Covering Climate Now went so well that it's going to continue, and the initiative is hiring.

There's an open managing editor/social media director position, based in New York City. Click here to read more details. 

Covering Climate Now is an international climate collaborative reporting effort co-founded by The Nation and Columbia Journalism Review. 

The Nation's Mark Hertsgaard and Columbia Journalism Review's Kyle Pope co-authored an article about it this week, looking back over the week-long project in which 323 news outlets from the U.S. produced and shared climate news coverage surrounding the United Nations Climate Action Summit on Sept. 23. It included media organizations like Bloomberg, Univision, The Times of India, and The Guardian; the latter is Covering Climate Now's lead media partner.  

They wrote that one of their goals moving forward is "to make the climate story a routine part of daily news coverage, rather than a subject addressed on special occasions." 

💰 Collaborative reporting grants announced for Oklahoma City-area media organizations

Grant funding to support five collaborative reporting projects is now available for Oklahoma City media organizations via the Peer Learning + Collaboration Fund.

Through a partnership with Ethics & Excellence in Journalism Foundation and Inasmuch Foundation, the Center for Cooperative Media will award five projects funding of up to $9,400 each. 

Applications are open through 5 p.m. on Friday, Dec. 20. Award winners will be notified on Friday, Jan. 10, 2020, and funding will be disbursed in February. Projects must be complete by June 30, 2020.

💻 Is your collaborative project in our database?

Are you working on a collaborative journalism project? Let us know!

We’re collecting examples of collaborative journalism projects from around the world, and you can be involved. It's for a database that includes details about partnership style, partners, funding support, audience engagement and more, so that everybody has the opportunity to learn from the projects that have come before.

If you’ve seen or worked on an interesting collaborative project, we want to hear about it. Email Mariela Santos-Muñiz (mariela.santos123@yahoo.com) with the name or a URL to help contribute to this important resource. We're looking forward to hearing from you. 

What we're reading: 

• More than 30 newsrooms team up to investigate criminal cops in California (Desert Sun)
• NPR's Mark Memmott hired as statewide managing editor for collaborative public radio hub in Texas (KERA News)
• Stories of Atlantic City shows the power of community-driven collaborative journalism (Center for Cooperative Media on Medium)
• Through the cracks: Colorado Independent and Rio Blanco Herald Times team up for a two-part investigation into a police shooting (The Colorado Independent)
• To fight Google and Facebook, European publishers try login alliances (Digiday)
• Collaborative reporting grants announced for Oklahoma City-area media organizations (Center for Cooperative Media on Medium) 
• ICFN and the Facebook Journalism Project team up to create the Fact-Checking Innovation Initiative (Poynter) 
• BBC plans expansion of local democracy reporting partnerships dependent on new external funding sources (Press Gazette)
• Tainted H20: 120 student journalists join journalists at 9 universities and 10 media companies to investigate Canadian tap water (Global News)