Have you exhaled yet from this year's crazy (that is an understatement) election season? We don't blame you if you haven't. It's been a wild, and seemingly never ending, ride. And combined with COVID-19, this year's reckoning with systemic racism and fighting mis/disinformation, it's hard to juggle it all. 

One of the rare high points of this election season has been seeing the creative approaches news orgs are taking to their reporting, joining forces with other publications to expand their reach and resource pool and in turn, better engage and inform audiences. Some of these initiatives were years in the making, while others sprung up in an effort to combat newer problems.  

Here are six of our favorite election-focused collaborative efforts: 

• First Draft: First Draft's collaborative work around the 2020 U.S. Elections has been nothing short of spectacular — and critically important. From its active Slack group to its weekly office hours, U.S. 2020 dashboard, fantastic newsletters, SMS election updates, its community alerts and Local News Fellowship, First Draft provided an incredible service to its community and journalists around the U.S. Its Local News Fellowship was an interesting new addition this year, in which five paid local news fellows were placed in communities predicted to experience high levels of mis/disinformation. The fellows collaborated with several local news outlets in their region, training other journalists on how to fight mis/disinformation and creating non-branded local reporting. 
   
• One Vote NC: The One Vote NC student news collaborative brought together seven college newspapers in North Carolina to produce stories and a voter's guide to help students navigate national and local races in the November election.  
   
• A Picture's Worth: Ohio Values: Six news outlets collaborated for the A Picture's Worth: Ohio Values audio series, which billed itself as not political, but rather focused on Ohioans and what mattered most to them. The result was a 24-episode series featuring a diverse range of residents sharing stories and the principles that guided them as they voted. 
   
• FactChat: Led by the International Fact-Checking Network at the Poynter Institute and supported by WhatsApp, the FactChat effort united 10 U.S. fact-checking organizations with two Spanish-language news broadcasters to fight mis/disinformation from Sept. 15 through Inauguration Day. Fact-checking partners publish their daily fact checks, while Noticias Telemundo and Univision translate and republish the content on their websites. The information is also available via a WhatsApp chatbot.
   
• Votebeat: Created by education news nonprofit Chalkbeat, the Votebeat pop-up newsroom funded and directed 15 reporters to cover local election administration and voting in eight states. Reporters covered translation issues in Pennsylvania, election day problems in New Jersey, stop the count efforts in Detroit and more. Stories were published in 10 local news outlets at no cost to the publication who reprinted it.
   
• Electionland: One of the most well-known and ambitious projects out there, ProPublica's Electionland includes more than 150 local and national newsrooms that track obstacles to voting in real time, mostly on Election Day. This could include long lines, harassment at the polls, misinformation about voting, voter ID issues, ballot design problems, or anything else that would prevent eligible voters from casting their ballots. 

📕 Using comics to tell the story of the coronavirus

An 800-word article or infographic about the coronavirus might make some people's eyes glaze over. But a comic book? That might do the trick.

Earlier this year, journalists and artists from the Charlotte Journalism Collaborative and BOOM Charlotte teamed up to create The Pandemic: Stories of COVID-19. The informative and extremely well-done eight-chapter graphic novel breaks down the spread of the virus, as well as how it impacted the people of Charlotte. And even better, it's available in both English and Spanish. 

A new chapter of the project is being released every two weeks at www.charlottejournalism.org and on Instagram, with a full printed version set for 2021. 

🤔 Have collaboration problems? We have solutions. 

There are SO many things to consider when planning your collaboration: how to manage information, what a timeline should look like, what products to use. The Center for Cooperative Media wants to help you make sense of all that (and more!) with our upcoming workshop on workflow and technology considerations for journalism collaborations.

Led by Project Facet founder Heather Bryant, this workshop will help you figure out solutions for common workflow and technology needs that arise during collaborative projects. She'll also discuss communication, content management, asset management, tasks, etc. 

💰 Press On announces funding for collaborative journalism projects in Dallas, New Orleans

Press On gave a nod to two collaborative projects this week, naming them Southern Movement Media Fund grantees. The Fund supports reporting collaborations and storytelling by and for Black and brown people in the South, and quite frankly, we can't wait to see the finished projects.

The winners include:

• Keri Mitchell of the Dallas Free Press, who joins Amber Sims of the Imagining Freedom Institute to tell the history of black schools in Dallas. The pieces will be published in the Dallas Free Press, a journalism nonprofit that seeks to shed light on Dallas' disinvested neighborhood, and Dallas Weekly, a legacy Black newspaper in Dallas.
• Maria Murriel and Isis Madrid of Pizza Shark, who will investigate the colonial roots of the eviction crisis and produce an oral history multimedia newsletter and podcast in collaboration with housing justice advocates in New Orleans. 

📚 What we're reading: 

• College newsroom collaborative uses Table Stakes principles to get students voting (UNC Center for Innovation and Sustainability in Local Media)
• The Nation and the Texas Observer partner on hard-hitting accountability journalism in a key battleground state (The Nation)
• Collaborative journalism project uses innovative storytelling to highlight the plight of insecure workers (Journalism.co.uk)
• Newsrooms team up to understand how the pandemic is playing out in rural communities (Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting)
• Fellowship calls for collaborative reporting to tackle deforestation, corruption, and governance (Pulitzer Center) 
• Collaborative reporting effort reveals how pork plant execs sacrificed safety for profits (USA Today)
• Venezuela media form fact-checking alliance for controversial legislative elections (LatAm Journalism Review)