Featuring Abbey Gingras, associate audience editor at Outside Magazine

EDITOR'S NOTE
You may have noticed we took a little break from The Cohort around the Fourth of July holiday. We’re back in action now, feeling (relatively) rejuvenated and (slightly more) ready to tackle the latest challenges.

Today we’re talking about partnerships and collaboration. First, Abbey Gingras, associate audience editor at Outside magazine, walks us through how to innovate with other news organizations. Then in the Cohort in Conversation section, I encourage you to think about interpersonal collaborations.

Because in life and in work, we cannot do it alone.

— Mel Grau, editor, The Cohort

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Journalism needs more collaborations. Here’s how to pull one off.
By Abbey Gingras

It’s no secret that 2020 has been a challenging year for the media. Layoffs, furloughs, and pay cuts
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have hit nearly every journalism organization in the U.S. — and that doesn’t even get into the toll that COVID-19 has had on the freelancing world
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. To make it through this latest crisis, our industry will need to shirk old habits and work together. This might sound overly idealistic — after all, many of the organizations we work for are for-profit ventures that are competing businesses at the end of the day. But there’s a solution here that makes business sense and editorial sense: collaboration.

What does collaboration look like? It doesn’t take on one simple form. The Texas Tribune, for instance, allows for its stories to be republished
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by other outlets to support the local news environment in Texas, and ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network supports
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local and regional newsrooms across the country on investigative projects. Other collaborations are one-on-one, such as The Marshall Project’s and The Guardian’s investigative project “Detained
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” from 2019, which won an Ellie award
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earlier this year for digital innovation.

Regardless of what form a collaboration takes, the outcome should serve both readers and the publications involved.

Last summer, my belief in collaborations led me to pitch a joint service package to my colleagues at Outside magazine and then to the editor-in-chief of Down East magazine in Maine — while I was on vacation. I don’t usually work during PTO, but I made an exception for this since I had already driven across the U.S. (and because professional in-person meetups are rare when you live in New Mexico!). This was long before pandemic-era budget cuts, and neither of our teams had done a partnership like this. But if 2020 has taught us anything, it’s that we can’t wait until times of upheaval to innovate and show readers why we’re worth their time.

These are the most important things I learned between that initial pitch and when we published the collaborative package
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last month — because what’s the point in working together if we don’t, as we say at Outside, share beta
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Be clear about your goals from the outset
It’s important to go into a project knowing why you’re doing it and what you hope to give your audience from it. For Outside and Down East’s collaboration, we saw this as a chance to build readership and trust: Outside could be exposed to new readers in an outdoor-rec heavy region of the country and benefit from Down East’s local knowledge of the Northeast, and Down East could be read by a national audience and benefit from our outdoor expertise. Each publication established both quantitative and qualitative goals early on based on audience development, including newsletter sign-ups, social media follows, and more.

Establish a project manager at each publication
Collaborations can get complex quickly — there are a lot of moving parts and players with any project, and that gets doubled when you involve a whole team from another organization. Between writers, photographers and editors, our project involved more than 20 people. Having a single project manager
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at each outlet will ensure workflows run smoothly on both teams and gives everyone a point person to go to with questions, ideas, problems, and so on.

This will save your colleagues a lot of unnecessary emails and Slacks, but be prepared to take on the bulk yourself. Down East’s point person, Brian Kevin, and I were sending dozens of emails back and forth in the days leading up to our launch.

Create a realistic timeline — and check on it often
We had initially hoped our project would run in late spring, but COVID-19 and its impact on travel made us change our timeline. Since hiking, camping, and other socially distanced outdoor activities became mostly considered safe this summer
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, we continued on with our plans to publish but established new deadlines and gave ourselves time to tweak story
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and promotion
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language to make our package as responsible as we could in light of the pandemic.

Wrenches will undoubtedly be thrown into any project, global crisis or not, so be prepared to take changes in stride. We regularly evaluate our audience strategy and adjust course as needed — this year, that looks like highlighting more beginner content
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(since we're seeing tons of new people
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trying out outdoor activities during quarantine) and microadventures (like camping close to home
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or birding in your backyard
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).

Divide up the work (and costs) fairly
Since both organizations are going to share the benefits of a collaboration, they need to share the work and costs, too. For us, that division of labor looked like splitting article assignments, editing, and fees 50/50 between our publications and agreeing upon equal promotion of the package and its stories. A fair split ensures that each side feels they are giving equal effort to the success of the project and prevents anyone from feeling like they are doing all the heavy lifting alone.

Analyze your work after publication
This is the final step — and when those earlier goals come into play. Outside and Down East will be sharing analytics in a few weeks once we’ve wrapped up a month of promotion of our package so we can fully assess the success of our work based on our goals. By looking at the quantitative and qualitative data, we’ll be able to determine what worked, what didn’t, and if a similar project would be productive in the future. It’s easy for this step to get lost in the shuffle of endless workflows, but don’t let it.

Above all, remember that while working together is good for our budgets and workloads, it’s also great for readers who get products that have the overlapping expertise of multiple media outlets. We love a win-win-win — so go forth and collaborate.

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OPEN SOURCE
Abbey’s sources of energy and inspiration. You can follow her at @abbeygingras on Twitter
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and Instagram
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.

What’s your best Instagram follow?
Cheap Old Houses
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on Instagram. I can’t remember when I stumbled upon this account — it must have been two years ago at this point — but I have since become an obsessed follower and have shared it far and wide with everyone I know. I won’t be buying a house any time soon, but this account gives me hope that I can afford homeownership in the future. Be sure to also check out Cheap Nordic Houses
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for a double dose of home and travel inspiration.

Who do you look up to professionally?
So many people! But the top of my mind is Adriana Lacy, an audience editor at the Los Angeles Times. Not only do I admire the work of her and her team, but she’s done so much for journalism accessibility with her website for journalism internships
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that offers free mentorship to students as well. The fact that she runs that, while working full time, and manages to teach journalism and write a newsletter too is just so inspiring and impressive to me.

What’s your social media anxiety?
Accidentally posting something personal on the brand account! I always triple check which Instagram or Twitter I’m logged into but I am constantly worried about making this mistake.

How are you staying sane this summer?
My dog Koda
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. He gets me out of the house on hikes and walks multiple times a day, and most weekends he and I will camp at least one night in one of the national forests near Santa Fe. He’s just as excited to climb a mountain as he is to roll around in grass at a park, and that enthusiasm makes familiar trips close to home seem much more adventurous.

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FROM OUR SPONSOR
This week’s newsletter is sponsored by Coursera.

Looking for an expert source? Find and connect with academics from top universities on the Coursera | Expert Network
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, a new, free tool for journalists. Discover a diverse set of subject matter experts who can speak to this week’s trending news stories at experts.coursera.org
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today.

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FREE MENTORING
Are you considering a collaboration or managing a big project for the first time? Navigate these challenges with the help of mentors on Digital Women Leaders
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, such as:

Anika Anand
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, programming director at LION Publishers and co-founder of Seattle’s The Evergrey. LION just announced a new partnership with Google News Initiative called GNI Startups Lab
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. She can help you with product strategy.

Rebecca Feldhaus Adams
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, the first news director at WHRO Public Media. She can help you with creating systems, workflows and happy teams. In past lives, she has been named both a roller derby MVP and Miss Congeniality.

Julie Vitkovskaya
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, projects editor at The Washington Post. Last year, she helped organize and launch some of The Post’s major projects including The Afghanistan Papers, The Opioid Files and 2C: Beyond the Limit, a climate change series that won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for explanatory reporting. She can help you collaborate across teams and lead innovative projects.

FIND YOUR MENTOR [link removed]
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COHORT IN CONVERSATION
By Mel Grau

If you'd like to dive deeper into what makes a successful collaboration, sign up for this Poynter webinar
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with ProPublica senior editor Alexandra Zayas planned for early fall. You’ll go behind the scenes of award-winning collaborations to see what worked and what didn’t.

In talking about collaboration as a tool for resource-strapped news organizations, I can’t help but think about collaboration as a necessity for journalists run ragged. Especially leaders. Especially Black women. Especially parents of school-age kids.

(Parents, how are you feeling about the start of the new school year mid-pandemic? Poynter's Kristen Hare is working on a story now and would love to hear from you. Email her at [email protected]. You might also consider joining the Media Moms
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group on Facebook, a kind, supportive community that can hold space for whatever you’re going through right now.)

If you have extra capacity, now is the time to pick up slack for your colleagues. If you need help, now is the time to ask for it. There might actually be a new efficiency or creative solution waiting for you.

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