NewsBeat

December 2016 NewsBeat 7 the Times' print circulation in the San Francisco region (its second-largest market) but to turn that increased local relevance into more local advertising dollars. That relationship ended in 2012, when Bay Citizen folded into the Center for Investigative Reporting, but its lessons lived on. (The Times launched an in-house variation on the idea with California Today earlier this year.) "For the Times, there was a journalistic purpose to [the Bay Citizen partnership], which was 'give us access to really good, smart, high-quality Timesean local journalism'," said Griggs. "On the business side, there was a clear measurable circulation bump when we did those kinds of partnerships." Griggs saw similar benefits to collaboration, albeit on the state level, during his time at The Texas Tribune. When the paper launched in 2009, it faced the same challenges that every new news organization does: Getting more people to be aware that it existed and, in turn, turning a financially significant portion of those people into paying subscribers, event attendees, or eyeballs for local advertisers to reach. Its strategy in reaction to this challenge was straightforward. Any local paper, radio station, or television network was able to freely republish Texas Tribune content as long as they gave the newspaper credit for the reporting. "That was critical to growing all sorts of lines of revenue," Griggs said. Partnerships have been core to the Texas Tribune's strategy over the years. Like Bay Citizen, it also had a regional partnership with the Times, the longest lasting of the newspaper's (it also had one in Chicago). Soon after that ended, in 2014, the newspaper inked a similar deal with The Washington Post, which agreed to partner with the paper on content, events, and marketing. The Texas Tribune even embedded a reporter in the Post's D.C. newsroom. Another potential model for collaboration comes from the likes of ProPublica and the Center for Investigative Reporting, which have created many national/local reporting collaborations on big stories about criminal justice, education, and the environment. For ProPublica, the latest of these came earlier this month when it launched Electionland, a joint project between six other organizations that will focus on local election issues around the country. Griggs said that he sees particular promise for local collaborations with single-subject national news organizations such as The Marshall Project, Chalkbeat, and InsideClimate News. Of course, even the most well intentioned collaborations don't come without their share of challenges. Many organizations simply lack the bandwidth or resources — human or otherwise — to start and sustain these kind of partnerships. This is why a major part of the Local/National News Partnerships Project is creating processes and offering best practices to reduce the kind of friction that naturally emerges from different organizations working together. "So much of this is asking: How can we make it easy for organizations to collaborate with one another and make the entire process more systematic?" Murray said. And then there are the human challenges. In many newsrooms, there's "often an unwillingness to collaborate, for whatever reason," Griggs said. "That's not true everywhere, but it's true in some places." In that sense, the first step towards making collaboration happen is winning over reporters and editors and making the case for why collaborating will do more than just another duty to their workloads. Whatever form these collaborations take, and despite their challenges, Griggs says they'll continue to be an essential part of the industry. And those unwilling reporters and editors will have to fall in line. "By this point, it's clear that news organizations need to partner to expand their capacity. You have to be a more collaborative player culturally, in the market, and nationally. That's just the reality, Griggs said. "Anyone who thinks something different is nuts." — Reprinted from NiemanLab

• Cover