🏆 One collaboration Pulitzer, one finalist

Huge congrats to The Marshall Project, Alabama Media Group, The Indianapolis Star and the Invisible Institute for winning this year's Pulitzer Prize in national reporting, for their yearlong investigation of K-9 units and the damage that police dogs inflict on people in the U.S. 

We love to see collaborative efforts take home prestigious awards like this!

And shoutout to Buzzfeed News and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalist for being a finalist in the international reporting category for the FinCEN Files, and the Invisible Institute, The Intercept and Topic Studios for being an audio reporting finalist for “Somebody." 

👂 Ju-Don Marshall on how listening (really listening!) drives collaboration

Ju-Don Marshall is the chief content officer and executive vice president at WFAE, the national public radio station in Charlotte, North Carolina. Marshall is no stranger to collaboration; she was the first director of the Center for Cooperative Media in 2013. (Woo!)

Marshall also spent 17 years at The Washington Post, and over her career has led national and local coverage. Marshall now oversees programming and community engagement at WFAE, where she has received grants from such organizations as American Journalism Project and Solutions Journalism Network to collaborate and expand the station's reach.

We caught up with Marshall to chat about her work WFAE and why listening is so crucial to collaborative journalism. You don't want to miss this!
 

🌏 Collaborative Down Under shows that Asian Stories are global stories

Asia is underreported on in the world, considering the important developments within the region and outside of it. There is a lot of room for growth for collaboration in, with, and about the region. As a result, the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas, in Sydney, Australia, launched Asian Stories in 2020. 

The project is a "multi-year, multi-dimensional effort to help Asian and international journalists tell the region's most important stories in intelligent and encouraging ways," according to JNI.  

Notably, stories have already been published as a result of a cross-border investigation on image-based abuse. Carried out by journalists from the South China Morning Post (Hong Kong), Korea Times (Korea), Tempo (Indonesia), the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism and ABS-CBN (both in the Philippines), it discusses online crimes, some of which are aimed at women and children. 

🔦 Covering a Congresswoman: Colorado newsroom collaboration shines a spolight on Lauren Boebert 

Politics is a hot button issue across the U.S. at the local and national level, as elected officials shape so much of what goes on in the nation.

Out west in Colorado, eight newsrooms united to report on the voter base supporting Republican, right-wing Congresswoman Lauren Boebert: The Colorado Sun, The Aspen Times, Steamboat Pilot & Today, The Ouray County Plaindealer, The Rio Blanco Herald Times, The Vail Daily, The Glenwood Springs Post Independent, and The Durango Herald.

This is a good example of an in-depth piece that was made easier and more comprehensive by spreading interviews out over several news organizations. 

🗄️ Is your collaboration to our collaborative journalism database yet? Time to make sure it is!

The Center for Cooperative Media at Montclair State University has a handy database of international and domestic journalism collaborations, and we always accept submissions. And we are approaching a milestone of 500 catalogued collaborations!

If you're working on a collaborative project, or have worked on one in the past, feel free to send the information that you have on the project. If you haven't worked on a collaborative project (it's not too late!), you can share this callout with the journalism professionals in your circle. 

Send the information via this form, or email Mariela Santos Muniz at santosmunizm@montclair.edu or info@centerforcooperativemedia.org. Thank you!

📚 What we're reading:

• Microsoft partners with community foundations, news organizations in local journalism collaboration in northeastern Wisconsin  (Post Crescent)
• Trends, solutions and innovations: LMA staff shares takeaways from the 2021 Collaborative Journalism Summit (Local Media Association)