With money tight, news organizations are collaborating on major stories
Hundreds of news outlets are showing how to produce great work despite scarce resources
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News organizations strapped by budget cuts and layoffs are finding ways to do great public service journalism, in spite of the challenges. One way is not to compete but collaborate.
Across borders and neighborhoods
The Center for Cooperative Media at Montclair State University in New Jersey has just published its list of the Top 10 Journalism Collaborations of 2025.
If you’re not on the list, maybe you can make it next year. In the meantime, the message is that good public service journalism is still happening everywhere, especially when media join forces. You just might not have heard about it.
The splashy bad news will always get the attention, and that can be depressing. But progress happens gradually, bit by bit, often unnoticed, at the grass roots level.
We can all learn from these 10 examples compiled by Stefanie Murray, director of the Center for Cooperative Media. Which ones do you think are the best?
Here are three of the top 10 that caught my attention.
#2. International Consortium of Investigative Journalists
The ICIJ produced three cross-border collaborations with impressive results.
Damascus Dossier, “exposed the inner workings of former Syrian President Bashar Assad’s system for detention, torture and murder,” writes Stefanie Murray of Montclair State. “CIJ worked with 24 media partners in 20 countries, drawing on more than 134,000 classified Syrian intelligence files and 70,000 photographs documenting the deaths of more than 10,200 prisoners.”
China Targets, “revealed how Beijing uses international institutions like Interpol to target critics and extend repressive tactics worldwide.”
The Coin Laundry, “exposed how cryptocurrency platforms profit from the proceeds of crime. More than 100 journalists from ICIJ and 37 news outlets in 35 countries traced tens of thousands of cryptocurrency transactions and found major exchanges moving hundreds of millions of dollars tied to illicit actors — even after some had pleaded guilty to crimes related to money laundering.”
These investigations demonstrate ICIJ’s ability to coordinate complex data-driven reporting across continents.
#4. The Immigrant News Coalition
Shifting from international collaboration to the more local, four nonprofit newsrooms that serve immigrants and the Listening Post Collective have formed the Immigrant News Coalition.
Murray reports: “The coalition brings together Documented (New York), Conecta Arizona, Sahan Journal (Minnesota), and El Tímpano (Bay Area) to collaborate on stabilizing and scaling their work. This comes at a critical time: the group noted that more than 150 ethnic media outlets have shuttered since 2020, leaving immigrant communities without reliable news in their languages.”
The coalition is supported by a three-year, $1.5 million grant from Press Forward and a $350,000, two-year grant from Democracy Fund.
#6. The Wichita housing investigation
Murray again singled out a local news collaboration, this one using sophisticated data analysis. The Wichita Journalism Collaborative — a coalition of 10 organizations including KMUW and The Journal — to explain why finding a home in Wichita has become so difficult, particularly for first-time buyers.
“The investigation analyzed 20 years of building permit data and found that Wichita is missing 17,000 single-family homes that would have been built if the community had maintained its pre-recession construction pace,” Murray reported.
Even more examples
90 journalism funders in U.S. collaborate
An audience of news media professionals at the 2025 International Symposium of Online Journalism heard stern words from fund-raiser Dale Anglin:
“You are a naturally competitive industry. You cannot be that going forward,” said Anglin. She is executive director of Press Forward, a coalition of 90 funders managing a $500 million investment into local news across the U.S. Her message was clear: the path forward isn’t about outpacing each other, but about working together.
Press Forward’s approach is a “ground up” model that acknowledges the different needs and contexts of every American community. They see their role as strengthening local newsrooms, advancing public policy that expands access to local news, and “scaling the infrastructure the sector needs to thrive,” according to their website.
North Carolina public radio stations join forces
Radio station WUNC announced a partnership with public media stations across the state to launch a journalism collaboration “expanding North Carolina state government news coverage for North Carolina audiences throughout the year.” The collaboration is funded by a two-year grant from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB).
The stations involved are WUNC (Triangle), Blue Ridge Public Radio (Asheville), WFAE (Charlotte), WHQR (Wilmington), and WFDD (Winston-Salem).
Here is the link to the full report.
Arguing for future collaborations
Nieman Lab does an annual survey of media experts on what they see for journalism in the coming year. Three of the forecasters weighed in on collaboration:
Saba Long of Atlanta Civic Circle advocated for “a shared repository to upload interviews, link articles, and dump the results of open records requests — all with a clear chain-of-custody protocol.”
Laxmi Parthasarathy, a media executive and strategist who was previously chief operating officer of Global Press, noted that “136 U.S. newsrooms have closed or merged in 2025 alone.” That alone should be enough to support her case for radical collaboration. She showed that it’s being done well in Rhode Island, St. Louis, Chicago, and California.
“Collaboration is booming,” particularly among nonprofit news organizations, says Joshua P. Darr, an associate professor at Syracuse University. While he sees a loss in local news coverage as large chains consolidate, smaller local news organizations are organizing to fill the gap.
This week’s cartoon, by Harry Bliss, from the New Yorker.
