I brought together 23 local news organizations and stood up a new collaborative, the Pittsburgh Media Partnership — a two-year grant-funded initiative of the Center for Media Innovation at Point Park University (Fall 2019 to Fall 2021). The work included establishing its organizational structure and processes for distributing shared resources and funding.

Originally intended to support a singular collaborative reporting project, we pivoted in March 2020 to support the organizations and about 30 editors as they delivered information through unrelenting news cycles and managed their staffs through the challenges of a pandemic. The support I provided as project director included:

Facilitating collaborative brainstorming and problem-solving and creating editorial resources to help editors plan coverage strategies, share skills and amplify each others’ work.

Conducting continuous needs assessments to help connect newsrooms with internal and external editorial and business-side resources to increase their capacity to do the work.

Designing and implementing new programs to directly invest in their newsrooms, including distributing about $20K in grants to improve product capabilities and a $30K pooled fund to support collaborative reporting efforts, as well as other initiatives such as a paid internship program that placed 13 students in their newsrooms during summer 2021.

Day-to-day project management, including grant reporting responsibilities and managing contractors, temporary part-time employees and students.

One of our partners, Marcia Liggett of Soul Pitt Media, on its impact:

“Pittsburgh is known for its pockets of diverse cultures. Never has such an asserted effort been made to blend these cultures through a journalistic collaboration. PMP bridges the gap by giving an equal voice to small and start-up journalistic businesses, as well as large publications and local media. Such a feat has never been accomplished in Pittsburgh — until now.”

In my role as project director at the Pittsburgh Media Partnership, I designed — quickly — a grant program in order to distribute about $20,000 to help the partners in the collaborative as the COVID-19 pandemic created financial pressure and restrictive working conditions for them while their newsrooms worked around the clock to cover the outbreak’s impact on their communities. The grants were intended to relieve some of the pressure by creating new capabilities to do the job remotely and to reach audiences digitally.

The concept for the program came out of continuous needs assessments I was making as I talked with the editors and publishers in March and April, and was part of the pivot we made after it became clear that the original enterprise project the collaborative intended to work on needed to be put aside.

How it worked: Grants were offered on a sliding scale to individual organizations based on the immediate need. No maximum limit was set for the requests, but partners were told the goal was to allocate the pool of funding equitably. Based on the response, partners took that to heart and asked for what they needed most. Our bigger, more well-funded partners asked for less than our smaller, less-funded ones. And we were able to fund all but one of the requests. To apply, editors sent me an email answering three questions. I designed a quick rubric to evaluate the responses and pulled together a committee to review, score them and make the final determinations.

The grant program was announced in mid-April 2020 and a deadline for the first round of applications was set for May 1. Grants were awarded to the Partners by May 18. With a relatively small investment we were able to make a significant impact for nearly a dozen organizations.

Feedback:

PMP “changed the way MVI communicates electronically.” — Kevin Iacovangelo, director of digital marketing and IT, Mon Valley Independent

The grant “alleviated some of the hardships during one of the most difficult years of [Pittsburgh City Paper’s] recent history.” — Lisa Cunningham, editor-in-chief, Pittsburgh City Paper

As project director for the Pittsburgh Media Partnership, I designed and stood up a new paid internship program, designed and managed a new hiring process to bring on a part-time coordinator to create the curriculum and manage it, and oversaw the program’s summer 2021 implementation.

I also guided the documentation process for the pilot project, helping to craft the case for continuing it in 2022.

For the Pittsburgh Media Partnership, a new journalism collaborative, I facilitated workshops designed to help news leaders at nearly two dozen local outlets agree on the topics of shared editorial projects. I also facilitated regular monthly meetings to guide shared brainstorming and problem-solving throughout 2020 and 2021.

How I helped:

I hosted an in-person day-long workshop in October 2019, where editors and reporters brainstormed, pitched and voted on the direction for the shared project. Based on that work, I drafted an MOU for the project, and 20 news organizations signed on to form the new collaborative.

In January 2020, I reconvened the founding partners, planning and hosting a dinner and then another half-day workshop to finalize the editorial plan that would guide the reporting and publishing schedule. In March 2020, when the pandemic put the project on hold, I hosted regular meetings for editors to share resources, ideas and collaborate on solving problems.

In January 2021, I hosted a virtual workshop, with both synchronous and asynchronous activities, to facilitate the partners’ decision on a new direction for the shared collaborative project. That project, Missing Bridges: Mental Health, launched in late summer 2021. That work included:

* An investigation into the crisis of care for Pennsylvania’s aging population, a collaborative reporting project between Spotlight PA and PublicSource.

* An investigation into the mental health impacts of air and water pollution in western Pennsylvania, a collaboration between Environmental Health News and The Allegheny Front.

* Live storytelling on mental health challenges and stigmas, hosted by Storyburgh and Soul Pitt Media.

In late summer of 2020, I helped members of the collaborative Pittsburgh Media Partnership track school reopening decisions being made across more than a hundred districts within the greater Pittsburgh region.

The data was shared with news partners internally through a central spreadsheet that I managed and manually populated with the help of students at Point Park University. (A public version of the resource was also published on the project’s site.)

The tool helped each news outlet add depth and context to their coverage, giving them the ability to compare and contrast the decisions of the schools they covered with those outside of their beats.

It also showed where disparities or creative solutions were occurring, sparking, for example, the collaborative reporting project, which I edited: “Endless buffering: Local schools try to solve students’ internet access issues on their own.”

Resources created for the project also included a shared data analysis of school enrollment data that news partners in the collaborative were able to use for stories or editorial planning. (Produced by a part-time data reporter I managed as part of the overall project.)