There are a ton of collaborations happening between smaller publishers at the moment. Two or three journalists don’t have the resources to tackle big topics, but they can when they work on stories together.
I find out about many of these stories from the “Center for Cooperative Media” based at Montclair State University in New Jersey. They have an excellent newsletter that covers projects such as Amazon Underworld.
Amazon Underworld describes itself this way: “Between May 2022 and July 2023, our team of 37 journalists and media professionals from 11 countries ventured into rarely explored corners of the Amazon to understand its criminal ecosystem.”
The project is entirely WordPress based, and so are the main publishers in the project: InfoAmazonia, Armando.Info and La Liga Contra el Silencio.
I’ve been writing that something new is growing in journalism.
Why is an ecosystem of new publishers emerging now? One of the reasons is that there are supporting organizations and tech partners. Many of these didn’t exist a few years ago. There are organizations like INN, Press Forward, Tiny News Collective, States Newsroom, Report for America, Local Independent Online News, and The American Journalism Project. There are tech partners such as Newspack, PaywallProject, Lede and IndieGraf.
The Center for Collaborative Media is an exception, having been around for 10 years. They connect newsrooms online and at in-person events.
