Download Otter for your meeting notes

Research roundtable: Cross-field collaborations (CJS2022 Day 2): Otter Voice Meeting Notes

Research roundtable: Cross-field collaborations (CJS2022 Day 2)

Joe Amditis30min

Stefanie Murray

00:02

So next we're going to turn to our research round table. We've got 330 minute research papers to present to you all very new research. One paper that was published a few weeks ago, one that was published yesterday, and one that has not been published yet, you're gonna get a sneak peek at. So first I'd like to welcome my colleague, Sarah Stonbely to the stage. And she is going to present about Crossfield collaboration, a research paper that we recently finished. So Sarah. Great, thank you so much, Stephanie. I am thrilled to be here at our sixth annual collaborative journalism Summit. I'm very excited to be able to speak about our latest research on collaboration, which is on Crossfield collaboration.

Sarah Stonbely

00:46

And I was so glad to see everyone in person here in Chicago yesterday, thanks to all who are joining online, it's really nice to be able to be in this space again.

Sarah Stonbely

00:58

So the research that I'm going to talk about today is, like I said, I'm Crossville collaboration, I want to acknowledge a couple people. One is my my co author, Hannah Sziemaszko. Another is Heather Bryant, who was very involved with the research as well. And I would also like to acknowledge the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, who brought this project to us and funded the research. And really, sort of were the, you know, the foundation for the the research itself. So we're really excited to be able to be here and speak about it with all of you. I would also like to note that I'm going to go through a bunch of slides today, I have all of the slides that I'm going to be able to be able to give to everyone. And I'm not going to speak to each one of them. So I encourage you if you are interested to check out the slides that I will be sharing later, there's an entire website devoted to our sub website devoted to the project, which is collaborative journalism.org backslash cross, hyphen field, and you can see everything about it there. And we also have for those of you who are with us in person today in Chicago, a few hard copies at the registration desk, so you can grab a hardcopy there if you'd like.

Sarah Stonbely

02:12

Let me start by defining Crossfield collaboration that is the cover of the hardcopy, if you happen to grab one. Across field collaboration, as we're calling them is a partnership involving one journalism organization, at least one journalism organization and at least one civil society organization who the civil society organization is usually can be an advocacy organization, but not always, in which they work together to produce content in the service of an explicit ideal or outcome. similar in many ways to collaborative journalism, collaboration between two journalism organizations as we defined it in our 2017 paper, comparing models of collaborative journalism, but different in the sense that obviously, it involves the civil society elements. So this can be NGO, university, civic tech, org, all any any sort of nonprofit type of organization who partners up with a journalism organization. These are usually crossborder in scope. They're usually investigative. And we've seen some of the most impactful investigative journalism and advocacy come out of cross field collaborations in recent years. Next slide, please. So in the research that we did, we looked at 155 Crossfield collaborations, so 155 specific projects, those one and 55 projects spanned 125 countries around the world. And the tally of entities involved was 1010. So it was a pretty sizable sample. So we were really happy with that. But I should say that as we continued to research, I mean, we were adding in projects up until the very last minute, and we really feel like we sort of just scratched the surface. So I think that there's a lot more to do in this space. Our method was snowball sampling. We did 52 interviews, and usually the interviews resulted in, you know, referrals to other people, you know, oh, let me introduce you this person, you should you have to speak to this person, you know, who I worked with on this project, etc. So that was great. But I should mention, you know, some sort of methodological caveats, which is that that meant that we probably didn't, you know, snowball sampling means you're sort of like self, the projects that you're looking at are sort of self referred. So as I said, there are a lot of projects that we didn't look at, specifically in, I would say, Asia and the Middle East, primarily because of sort of language barriers on a part of the research team, but also because, you know, it's just that I really think it's just a massive there's a massive universe of projects to look at. So, further research is always welcomed. We used airtable As our primary sort of place to store all the information, and you're welcome to dig into the paper and look at that if you'd like. Next slide, please. So I'd like to give you some examples of the types of cross blue collaborations that we looked at.

Sarah Stonbely

05:16

Where I'm going to talk about three different projects. But as I said, we looked at 155 different projects. So there were a lot more as well. The first was, next slide, please. A project called pluma hay from an investigative journalism organization in Mexico called NML, Politico. pluma. Hay is what animal politico has done is basically opened up an entire sub web sub site on their on their webpage to highlight and to give space to civil society organizations in Mexico. So this is something it's, it's, you know, more than they're acting more as just a source, because these are deep relationships that they've forged over the years, I believe they were I believe animal politico started in 2010. And they've forged deep relationships with civil society organizations. So they are, you know, just basically giving space to them in a way that, you know, lets the CSO, you know, speak for themselves and really like dive into the issues in a way that they wouldn't be able to do otherwise, if they were just quoted as sources, or, you know, putting out a press release or something like that. The next project that I wanted to highlight is from is one of these, it's from ICI J, it's called the FinCEN files, you may be familiar with it, it's kind of like a Panama Papers style, I hope they don't mind me saying that project, which is, you know, sort of just to say one of these very large sort of cross border investigative projects very, sort of typical of the type of investigation into corruption, and, you know, sort of democracy and that sort of thing that we saw, involving, like I said, dozens of news organizations, and then also, CSOs as well. And then finally, sensors, Africa, is very cool project out of Africa, which involves several news organizations, and then a bunch of civic tech orgs. And what this project did was, and also involving the community as well, there's a big engagement element, they put sensors air it for the air quality, for water quality. And this is not and not only water quality, but like to monitor the weather. So like when Fisher people would go out onto the water. A lot of times, there's not good information about what the weather is, and they could, you know, they get caught up in a storm or something like that. So next slide, please. I just wanted to show this is also very typical of a lot of the projects that we looked at, where they have a dedicated webpage for the projects, and they'll highlight very transparently, and like sort of proudly, all of the different partners involved. So you'll see there's like a bunch of news organizations that are based in Africa, and then in partnership with like code for Africa, and, you know, other civic tech awards and stuff like that. So these are just some of the projects that we looked at. Just, yeah, I'm gonna skip this slide. So as I've sort of alluded to, there were three topics that really rose to the top in terms of how common they were, like what most of these projects that we looked at, were about, the most common was governance and corruption. So 25% of the 155 sort of projects in our sample were about some elements of like, governance, corruption, like that sort of thing. 16% were about climate or the environment, and 15% were about human rights issues, including women's rights, LGBTQ plus and other stuff like that. So these these were very, these are the most common topics and you can sort of begin to see you know, it's not like most of these projects are not trying to highlight like good things that are happening, although I'm sure they would love to, you know, right. It's usually like wrongdoing, malfeasance other sketchy things happening

Sarah Stonbely

08:49

in with under these umbrellas. I talked a little bit about the caveats. I can go to the next slide, please. So really, like why why has Crossfield collaboration become more prominent? What has driven, you know, journalists, organizations, and civil society organization department partner more commonly, more sort of more explicitly with more intention. And as we began to, you know, sort of, as we spoke to people, we spoke to 52 people in lengthy interviews, and we gathered a bunch of data through survey through surveys that we sent out, and then obviously, a lot of desk work and stuff like that sort of research and stuff like that. We identified three different reasons that we think Crossfield collaboration is becoming more common. Number one, and these are not wholly different from the reason why collaborative journalism in general, is becoming more common. Number one, information producers can no longer rely on the common, you know, the common channels for their work to be seen, right. So it's not like you don't have like a big mainstream media or like, you know, a couple of very well read, you know, industry outlets. Really, it's such so fragmented now the media sphere so they are partnering to have broader reach, right. If you have more outlets involved do you have Our audience you have also the ability to put your information your content into different incarnations. So like it can take different forms. We heard from a lot of CSOs who said, you know, we love partnering with journalists, because it turns our sort of dry 50 page, white paper into, you know, a narrative form with visuals that people can, you know, become more engaged with. And vice versa, right, like, so the journalists who partner with the CSOs, they're happy to have their work be seen by those audiences as well. Number two is the resource constraints that are faced by so many newsrooms today, as we've heard so much about. And also what comes along with that is the specialized skills that, you know, civic tech orgs can bring to a project, right or journalist bring to a project or universities bring to a project, right? So when these topics become so complicated, I mean, these investigative projects are so complicated, they require all these different sets of skills. It is everyone's benefit, if brings a lot of people together with different skills. And finally, and perhaps most interestingly, there's a greater desire for impact, right? When so many time and resources are put into an investigative project like this. It's really frustrating to not see any impact from it. And, of course, most advocates, you know, CSOs if they're advocacy organizations that sort of their reason for being but for journalists, as well. We talked to a lot of people who said, you know, of course, we are neutral, and we don't have an end game in mind, but but at the same time, like we want this work to have impact. So that's a really interesting ethical quandary that I'll talk about a little bit more in a second. If you have or if you're looking at the full paper, or you have the hardcopy, we do some histories or some some historical context and definition work, which I'm not gonna get into right now. So, we started by digging, by digging in and looking at like, Okay, well, what are these? You know, what's, what's the percentage of journalism and CSOs? So we found that within our sample, so I should also just say, like, of course, this is just within our sample, it could be different if there's a bigger or different sample, roughly 60% were journalism organizations, and roughly 40% were CSOs, although I want to caveat that slightly by saying that, there were like a couple huge projects, like FinCEN files, where it was like 99 journalism organizations and for CSOs, so the number actually might be closer to 5050. And that implies Next slide, please. Where were the entities based, who worked on the projects in our sample 57% were in Europe, North America. 12% were in Central America, primarily Mexico, Mexico has a lot of Crossfield collaboration happening. 11% were in Africa, 10%, South America, Asia 2% was another. So again, this is me maybe speaks more to our sample than, you know, just sort of the snowball the snowball method, but it's happening everywhere is one of the main takeaways. We found something really interesting as we were looking through this and thinking through who was involved, we thought we saw that certain countries had entities that we're working on projects that were based elsewhere, right? So a lot of entities from the US, for example, are working on projects based in Africa, based in Mexico, based in Europe. And we decided to call those countries sort of crossbow collaboration exporters. We also saw that certain countries had projects that were focusing on them, but they had no sort of homegrown organizations involved. Afghanistan.

Processing audio...