Our “Cracking the Code” collaboration has been named one of the year’s “notable collaborations” by Stefanie Murray at the Center for Cooperative Media at Montclair State University. Others: The Guardian, ProPublica, the Paradise Papers, the Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting.
“As the number of partnerships happening across the journalism industry increases, the journalism being produced out of those collaborations is steadily maturing. Here’s a look at some of the most interesting editorial collaborations of 2017,” Murray wrote in a piece on MediaShift. As the head of the Center for Cooperative Media, Murray is a leading national expert on collaborations.
She spotlighted nine collaborations, topping the list with the Paradise Papers, in which the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists “worked with 94 media partners to digest and analyze 13.4 million leaked files — which were obtained by German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung.” Other partners included The New York Times, Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting, Univision and the Columbia Journalism School.
Another featured project is “Documenting Hate,” a ProPublica “collaborative effort that seeks to collect and verify reports of hate crimes and bias incidents across the country to create a database that journalists, researchers and civil rights organizations can use.”
Also noted is a collaboration of The Guardian and the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, On the Ground, commissions journalism from reporters across the country who live in, work in and intimately know communities across America that are underreported.
Finally, Murray lists “a few other notable collaborations,” including our Cracking the Code. “This collaboration between ClearHealthCosts, WVUE FOX 8 in New Orleans and NOLA.com/The Times-Picayune launched a crowdsourced health prices database and related reporting,” she writes.
We’re probably the smallest of the newsrooms mentioned, and one of the few that’s not a grant-funded nonprofit. A number of those named are overseas, and many of them are the top news organizations in their fields. It’s an honor to be included in this cohort.
Stefanie Murray is the director of the Center for Cooperative Media at Montclair State University; the Center is building an international program around collaborative journalism and runs collaborativejournalism.org. Contact her at murrayst@montclair.edu or @StefanieMurray on Twitter.
