Speakers, full program announced for Collaborative Journalism Summit 

We better see you there! 😋

This year's Collaborative Journalism Summit has a jam-packed program. We probably could have stretched the conference out over three days given all the amazing pitches we received from folks who want to talk about their collaborative projects!

But, we're not. (Maybe next year?)

Instead, you can look forward to a fast-paced, busy agenda on May 16-17 in Philadelphia. Please plan accordingly. The main auditorium where we'll be for much of the day on Friday will have work tables to make everyone more comfortable.

Tickets are on track to sell out, so grab yours now!  

One co-publishing effort wins Pulitzer, three collaborative projects named as finalists 

Several collaborative journalism projects have won Pulitzer Prizes over the last few years, the biggest and most well-known being The Panama Papers. This year, one co-publishing project won a Pulitzer and three collaborative efforts were named as finalists. We wanted to point them out:

Feature writing: ProPublica’s “Trapped in Gangland” series on MS-13, reported by Hannah Dreier, won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for feature writing. The stories were jointly published with New York magazine, Newsday and the New York Times Magazine. 

Breaking news reporting: The staff of the Chico Enterprise-Record in collaboration with the Bay Area News Group was named as a finalist for coverage of the California Camp Fire, which burned 18,000 buildings across 150,000 acres and killed 86 people. 

Explanatory reporting: Aaron Glantz and Emmanuel Martinez of Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting (in collaboration with Associated Press, PRX and the PBS NewsHour) was named as a finalist for work that analyzed more than 30 million mortgage records to uncover discrimination, known as redlining, in banking.

National reporting: The staff of The New York Times with contributions from Carole Cadwalladr of The Guardian/The Observer of London was named a finalist for work exposing how Facebook and other tech firms failed to protect consumer privacy or stop misinformation around the 2016 elections.

Join our new monthly collaboration manager calls!

Starting in June, we're going to start hosting an open, monthly call for collaboration managers across the U.S.

The purpose is to connect collaboration managers — including folks managing long-term collaboratives as well as those managing specific projects — so they have a regular space to support each other, ask questions, brainstorm solutions to challenges they are facing, etc. The calls will likely have a featured speaker each week and a relatively loose agenda, depending on what the managers on the call would like to discuss.

Ever been on one of OpenNews's awesome community calls, or Gather's fantastic conversations? Kinda like those. 

The first call is set for Tuesday, June 4, at 3 p.m. ET. To request an invitation, email Stefanie Murray at murrayst@montclair.edu.

We ask that all interested attendees fill out this short Airtable form, to give us a sense of what times, days and topics you’d like the calls to cover.

After the first call, we’ll post the schedule for all future calls on collaborativejournalism.org, as well as instructions on how to request future invitations, suggest speakers and add the calls to your calendar.

Data sharing is the backbone of many collaborations

Last week, the excellent Local Fix newsletter from Democracy Fund noted how "data journalism collaborations are emerging as a way to pool resources and centralize data in ways that can serve more newsrooms."

We've seen that in our database of collaborative reporting projects, as well, that many of them have a shared data or shared document cache component. 

Below, we're re-sharing the Local Fix's list of articles about collaborative data efforts and adding a list of some of our favorite reporting projects that were based around shared datasets that could be replicated elsewhere.

• USC’s Crosstown Project Turns Big Data into Local News - Northwestern Local News Initiative  (See also How to Cope with Data from Global Editors Network)
• 10 tips for collaborative data journalism projects - Global Editors Network
• ProPublica is building tools to help any newsroom do crowd-powered data investigations - ProPublica  
• Boosting local news with data journalism and automation - CJR 

• Chi.Vote 
• Rattled: Oregon's Concussion Discussion
• California Reporting Project
• Seeking Conviction 
• Missing Pieces 
• Texas Open Data Consortium
• Kept Out

Is your project in our database?

Not to sound like a broken record, but did you know we’re collecting examples of collaborative journalism projects from around the world? 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.

But we need your help populating the database. If you’ve seen or worked on an interesting collaborative project, we want to hear about it. Email Heather Bryant (heather@projectfacet.org) with the name or a url to help contribute to this important resource.

If you’re interested in building your own collaboration, we know of nearly 200 projects that can serve as a great starting point in figuring out how to structure and manage your project. Find out more by visiting the database.

What we're reading