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This initiative aims to help cross-newsroom collaborators more effectively pitch their projects.

The more we can guide decision-makers to “yes, and”-thinking and indisputable decision-making points, the smoother it will be to jump-start our collaborations.

Our goal here is to build upon news-industry norms to craft a multi-facted pitch that front-loads many project/process challenges. Instead of presenting them as obstacles, we’ll reveal them as key building blocks.

Transparently building upon norms and patterns can help our bosses and decision-makers focus on new facets of a project. By adopting this perspective, we could achieve faster approval, better guidlines and smoother projects overall.

Pick & choose from a full menu of options employed by highly collaborative news organizations, starting with editing your own list then working on some “polish” within some communication & tactical analysis frameworks. More on all that as we go.

A note: This initiative looks at pitch-crafting within the vocabulary of product development – that’s intentional! What you produce may not be a “product” per se. But we believe it is helpful to view your pitch as you asking your news org to invest in one. Your project’s process could be developed as a product in its own right – a template for future projects.

Pitch-Crafting Options (a WIP)

👕 Relative Sizes

We may expect to group types of collaborations based on the published output. But Size is perhaps a more useful grouping, because it implies different leadership structures, staffing needs and sharing agreements.

Size here can’t function with strict definitions, e.g. <= 3 reporters, or 3-5 reporters, etc. We’re borrowing the relative sizing of tee-shirts that’s used by our Product or Engineering peers to “guesstimate” effort without getting sidetracked into definitions too early in the process.

We can all understand a shift between a Small and a Medium tee-shirt, as a projection of effort a team will have to put in.

%%{init: {"theme": "base","themeVariables": { "background": "white", "primaryColor": "mintcream", "secondaryBorderColor": "cadetblue", "primaryTextColor": "cadetblue", "clusterBorder": "darkslategrey", "nodeBorder": "cadetblue", "clusterBkg": "white", "nodeTextColor": "darkslategrey", "defaultLinkColor": "cadetblue", "titleColor": "darkslategrey", "edgeLabelBackground": "white" }}}%% graph TD A[How many collaborators?] A --> S[\"Small" tee/] S -->|Shared/mixed leadership| sm(e.g., pairs, pods, pools) A --> M[\"Medium" tee/] M -->|Hub-and-spoke leadership| md(e.g., reporting networks) A --> L[\"Large" tee/] L -->|Dedicated leaders & staffing| lg(e.g., sustained initiatives)

👕 A “Small” collaboration (no judgement implied!) could be:

• As focused as a pair or trio of reporters sharing pooled resources but writing & publishing separately
• Reporting pods within a few neighboring newsrooms, sharing resources and publishing the same reporting on multiple news-org sites
• Reporting pool dedicated to long-term subject-matter areas
• TK¹

👕 More complex “Medium” collaborations may include:

• Local news cooperative, with each group lending separate expertise into a pod-style group, targeting a shared audience
• A reporting network, where one newsroom operates staff and resouces (the “hub”), with collaborators seen as “spokes” to the network and recipients of its work
• Particularly complex investigative threads
• TK¹

👕 “Large” collaborations are perhaps best exemplified by:

• “sustained initaitives” – a reporting project spun out of its home news orgs into its own staffing, funding and editorial decision-making
• Wire services, really
• Proprietary software development supporting one or more projects
• TK¹

All of these Size permutations come with their own complexities and challenges once they’re up and running, from an erosion of project management to power differentials to erosion of common good.

This initiative is not meant to provide guidance about executing on these patterns. That is a much more challenging area of organizational analysis and strategy. However, front-loading discussion about these potential stumbling blocks may circumvent them, once the project is running.

What to Include

Small Collaborations

Our tee metaphor masks a wide range of concerns even fearsome twosome of reporters may need to address over the course of their project. Below you’ll find emergent norms of these kinds of projects, grouped into three areas:

1. Audience [A]: the people you’ll be interacting with, from sources to future readers
2. Budgeting [B]: planning and project-management, from finances to story budgets
3. Culture² [C]: teamwork-building standards and structure

The idea here is that you can copy/paste these lists and re-mix them to fit your needs. Delete what isn’t appliable and create your own groupings.

[A] Audience-oriented items:

• Shared contacts in community
• Contact plan for more delicate or hesistant sources
• Social media visibility, guidelines and plan
• Publishing & audience metrics
• TK¹

[B] Budgeting items:

• Universal budget for who’s reporting on what
• Data-sourcing and -sharing agreements
• Financing, fundraising and/or grants (where applicable)
• Back-office advisors
• TK¹

[C] Culture-development items:

• Memo of Understanding (MOU) with vision statement, practices & reporting standards
• Communication platform focus, i.e. email, Slack, Signal, Teams
• Document sharing platform
• Task-management tracking system
• Stakeholder mapping & responsibility assignment matrices (RAM, RACI, PARIS or another) for defined roles & decision-making
• Agreement on status-update cadence up to parent news orgs
• Vocab & jargon definitions
• TK¹

Medium Collaborations

%%{init: {"theme": "base","themeVariables": { "background": "white", "primaryColor": "mintcream", "secondaryBorderColor": "cadetblue", "primaryTextColor": "cadetblue", "clusterBorder": "darkslategrey", "nodeBorder": "cadetblue", "clusterBkg": "white", "nodeTextColor": "darkslategrey", "defaultLinkColor": "cadetblue", "titleColor": "darkslategrey", "edgeLabelBackground": "white" }}}%% graph TD S[Everything from Small] S -->|+ PLUS +| M[\"Medium" tee/] M -->|Hub-and-spoke leadership| md[e.g., reporting networks]

[A] Audience:

• Small, plus
• Method for tracking and quantifying(?) impact
• Public fundraising plan and/or statement of need
• Data analysis methodology (where applicable)
• Open-sourced data (where applicable)
• TK¹

[B] Budgeting:

• Small, plus
• Legal guidance or consultation
• Product-management staffing
• Surveys & user-research (if applicable)
• IT support
• TK¹

[C] Culture:

• Small, plus
• Team-meeting candence(s), for full project staff
• Shared values statement, particularly for accountability projects
• Learning plans for collaboration members with asymmetric skills coming in
• Physical & psychological safety/support plan
• Coding standards & practices (where applicable)
• Follow-up & maintenance plan (and its own responsibilities-matrix plan)
• TK¹

Large Collaborations

%%{init: {"theme": "base","themeVariables": { "background": "white", "primaryColor": "mintcream", "secondaryBorderColor": "cadetblue", "primaryTextColor": "cadetblue", "clusterBorder": "darkslategrey", "nodeBorder": "cadetblue", "clusterBkg": "white", "nodeTextColor": "darkslategrey", "defaultLinkColor": "cadetblue", "titleColor": "darkslategrey", "edgeLabelBackground": "white" }}}%% graph TD SM[Everything from Small & Medium] SM -->|+ PLUS +| L[\"Large" tee/] L -->|Dedicated leaders & staffing| lg(e.g., sustained initiatives)

[A] Audience:

• Small plus
• Medium plus
• Contacts, sources or key figures tracked via a CRM tools
• Public maintenance/follow-up expectations (annual reports?)
• Archiving plans
• Public data usage-tracking (where applicable)
• TK¹

[B] Budgeting:

• Small plus
• Medium plus
• Legal counsel
• Human Resources
• Finance counsel or financial modeling & analysis
• Revenue-sharing plan, if there are fundraising or advertising earnings
• Insurance or other operational coverage
• [OKR]s(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OKR) & [KPI]s(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Performance_indicator) tracking
• TK¹

[C] Culture:

• Small plus
• Medium plus
• How-To/Playbook efforts
• Stakeholder reporting cadence(s)
• Collaborator reporting cadences(s)
• Onboarding & Offboarding plans
• TK¹

Tactical Pitching with “Types of Wins”

“Types of Wins” asks people who apply it to analyze things through a specific set of perspectives, each trying to help you describe your collaboration’s potential in different ways.

Once initial drafting is done, Types of Wins can help refine a Pitch into a tactical appeal that helps us push decision-makers towards more yeses.

Join us in “Types of Wins” for a tour of the framework and how it can help your pitch!

Other Models for Collaborations

Montclair University’s Center for Cooperative Media suggests a matrix model, with groupings by working relationships vs. time/deadlines. This specific chart version shows their potential intersections, like “Partners work together to create content” x “One-time or finite [timelines]”. The Center breaks out a dedicated Tip Sheets which are easy to read and contain many project-planning insights. There will be significant overlap between the Center and this initiative.

The Center for Cooporative Media’s collection and Report is a fantastic resource. This particular site will point to their work pretty frequently, particularly where questions lead from crafting a pitch into executing on plans.

TK second example with links into their pattern analysis.

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Mini-Site Pages:

• Main Checklist
• Refining with “Types of Wins”
• Roadmap

1. These lists only get better with community feedback and examples. We would be grateful for your suggestions! ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰ ↩¹¹ ↩¹²

2. Not the best term; please suggest a better one! ↩