THE GRANITE STATE NEWS COLLABORATIVE is a statewide collective of nearly 20 local media, education and community partners that have agreed to work together to co-produce and share news stories on the issues that most impact our state.
Though we started as a “project-based” collaborative, in the past year, we evolved into an organization of partners that can tackle emerging issues impacting our state along with specialized areas of focus such as our current initiative looking at race and equity in New Hampshire.
Logistically, this works because we have a centralized, neutral, organization–The Collaborative–that coordinates, manages and maintains the infrastructure that allows the partners to easily share their work, communicate, determine the emerging issues we’ll collectively tackle as they happen and even negotiate rules of engagement between competing outlets.
The Collaborative’s team of journalists, editors and data analysts fill in reporting gaps, by contributing in-depth, solutions-focussed stories and series Collaborative partners can publish on any of their platforms. They also can work directly with Collaborative partner editors on a short-term basis, to provide stories and data research that the outlet does not have the capacity to do. This saves our partners money, allows them to re-allocate internal resources to hyper local matters, and helps them deliver to their communities rigorously-reported news urgent issues.
For our project work, we’ve created small teams of editors from our partner outlets, each with a specific topic area of focus. They, along with our community edit team, help to create a slate of in-depth stories and series that will be included in the project over the duration of the given initiative. Those editors then work with reporters from partner outlets as well as Collaborative reporters to produce the work, which is then published by partners across the state. The Collaborative Director manages and tracks all of the projects to help ensure they come to fruition and provide additional resources as needed.