Creating partnerships
Creating Partnerships
The key to success for news-academic partnerships is, well — partnerships. Strong rapport, trust and communication must be built between your students, its partner newsroom, and your audience, as well as with key community partners and organizations.
KEY RESOURCE: College + Local News Collaboration Considerations (doc), Debbie Blankenship at the Center for Collaborative Journalism
- Building relationships with news partners
- Key Issues to Discuss Before you Embark on a News Partnership, American Press Institute
- Better News on Partnerships and Collaborations
- Examples of partnership letter template/agreements and MOUs by the Center for Cooperative Media
- CCN Brown Bag Discussion: “Collaborations with Public Media Organizations”
- Starting your own news organization
- Institute for Nonprofit News Startup Guide
- Digital Transformation Guide, American Press Institute
- Sembra Media (for Spanish-language projects)
Program models
Program Models
There is no one-size-fits-all model for news-academic partnerships. From funding to platforms to university resources to communities served, numerous factors shape how these newsrooms operate and why. Below are cornerstone resources for considering how your program could take shape/evolve and examples of some of these models.
Mission & Vision
Before choosing a program model, the purpose, audience and message for the news organization needs to be clarified, and all decisions should be built on that PAM (Purpose, Audience, Message).
- Purpose-driven questions: What is the mission of your news organization? What do you ultimately hope to achieve with your reporting? What makes your work unique compared to others in the same geographic or topical space?
- Audience-driven questions: Who does (or will) your reporting resonate best with now and what products do those audiences use? What do analytics (both quantitative and qualitative) point to as strongest and weakest products or platforms for your audience? What demographics do you wish to reach (next) or expand to with intentionality?
- Message-driven questions: What do you want/hope your organization is known “for” or “as”? What words/phrases best define or describe your news organization and why? What do you want to alter about how you are known?
Brainstorming what gaps (geographic, topical, demographic) your newsroom would address within the community you are serving is crucial. Use the templates and playbooks below to think through these big questions.
KEY RESOURCES
How to Build or Expand a News-Academic Partnership Worksheet (doc)
Amplify Utah Playbook, a step-by-step guide for building a news-academic partnership
College Media Playbook (doc), by Sydney Lewis with support from the Reynolds Journalism Institute
Program Models
There is a full list of case studies and a report by Richard Watts that summarizes the depth and breadth of model options, but here are a few example programs, separated by type, to inspire and guide.
As a specific course
LakeVoice News (case study and fact sheet)
The Oglethorpe Echo (case study and fact sheet)
Oxford Observer (case study and fact sheet)
Race, Ethnic and Community Reporting at American University (case study and fact sheet)
As an independent news organization
Columbia Missourian (case study and fact sheet)
Cronkite News (case study and fact sheet)
Philadelphia Neighborhoods (case study and fact sheet)
As a news service
Fresh Take Florida (fact sheet)
NSU-TV News Service (case study and fact sheet)
The Reporting Project (case study and fact sheet)
University of Vermont’s Community News Service (fact sheet)
As a topic-driven newsroom or program
LSU’s Cold Case Project (case study and fact sheet)
Quinnipiac University’s Ability Media (case study and fact sheet)
Medill’s Social Justice Reporting Program (case study and fact sheet)
University of Nevada Reno’s Noticiero Movil (case study and fact sheet)
As a statehouse bureau (full report)
FAMU Capital Bureau Class (case study and fact sheet)
Franklin College Statehouse File (case study and fact sheet)
Nebraska News Service (fact sheet)
University of Hawai’i at Manoa Civil Beat (case study and fact sheet)
As a partnership with professional newsroom(s)
The Daily Athenaeum (case study and fact sheet)
Illinois Student Newsroom at Illinois Public Media (case study and fact sheet)
Kent State News Lab (case study and fact sheet)
As an alternative model (interdisciplinary, microcredential, managed internship)
McClure Journalism Internship Program
As a study abroad
Bethel University study abroad
University of Richmond study abroad
As a statewide endeavor
Connecticut Student Journalism Collaborative
SUNY Student Reporting Programs
Louisiana statewide student reporting (based at LSU)
As a high school student-involved model
High school journalists program at North Texas
Connect Clermont (student news cooperative)
As an non-reporting model
UGA’s Visual Journalism programs
Leadership Structure
Leadership Structures
- Faculty-led newsroom: In this model, college faculty are the lead editors and executive producers for the reporting. Sometimes news organization leaders participate, too, but in many cases, content will simply be published by the newsroom once it’s vetted and approved by the faculty in the partnership.
- External editor: With the help of extra funding, some news-academic partnerships hire a part-time or full-time editor/producer, outside of a faculty role or specific course assignment, for the news-academic partnership to share the load for editing and provide feedback for publication or broadcast.
- News organization-led: Other partnerships are built on the premise that the newsroom leaders will do the vetting and approval of content, while the faculty member plays a secondary role with instruction. In these models, newsroom leadership works with students and/or faculty in order to get reporting to publication or broadcast level.
Onboarding and Training Resources
News-academic partnerships change staff often. Here are some tools for onboarding and transitioning between reporters and and other staff members:
Workflows & Roles
Workflows & Roles
The roles students take on in your newsroom (as well as the role(s) faculty play) will depend on too many variables to name, but there are key considerations — once a program model is established — that can keep the newsroom workflow efficient and effective.
- Pitch structure — many news-academic partnerships find success in a specific pitch formula (news value, sources, why the audience should care, platforms, etc.) along with a systematic way to provide pitches with feedback as pre-reporting begins
- Reporting and product roles — set clear expectations about sources, length and depth of content (writing, video, audio), style and editing guidelines, beat systems, photos and captioning, web and interactive elements, etc.
- Collaborative expectations — whether it’s between reporters themselves or with editors/producers, faculty, or professional journalists, guidelines about workload and communication frequency must be clear
- Editing process — create a consistent and rigorous path that reporting must go through before being seen by an audience; in essence, how much oversight will other members of the staff, faculty, professionals, and others have before it goes live; recommend that students are part of the editing process as editors when possible
- Local News Network Editing Workflows (University of Maryland)
- The Oglethorpe Echo Editing Workflow (University of Georgia) — all published work
- Editor/producer roles — these can be static for a period of time or students can rotate through them (like in this example) to gain experiences with editing, video, graphics, digital products, etc. For another example, a broadcast class workflow from Grady Newsource shows how students rotate through producer, editor and MMJ roles.
- Recommendations:
- Create a stylebook, editing workflow, and/or newsroom guide to ensure consistency and to capture the knowledge of each staff to be passed onto the next semester or year
- Create video walkthrus or other documentation for self-led role training