The Collaboration Stepladder: How One Organization Built a Solid Foundation for a Community-Focused Cross-newsroom Collaboration

Newsroom collaborations are growing increasingly common as news organizations struggle in tough economic times. This project explores one newsroom collaboration in Philadelphia, notable for its size, its scope across major, startup and ethnic media, and its lack of hierarchy. Based on in-depth interviews and a 16 months of observation, I create a typology of layers of collaboration observed, something I call the collaboration stepladder. Each step builds upon and is more intensive than the ones before it. The steps are simple sharing, collaboration on stories, collaborating on method, organizing events, allocating money, and working to resolve a problem in the community. Two major overarching themes emerge: the value placed by collaborators of working to make change in the community, and their focus on sustainability, both financial and of commitment. Each of the steps on the stepladder engages with these major themes in different but significant ways. While some critics of newsroom collaborations suggest they represent a cost-cutting measure, large projects like the one explored here are resource and personnel intensive, and cannot exist with an acknowledgement of that.