In 2019, the four largest public radio stations in Texas teamed up with NPR to establish a collaborative statewide newsroom. When that collaboration was first announced, NPR specified reporting goals including “increas[ing] coverage of statewide issues and boost[ing] reporting from underserved regions.” But the vision for this experiment was always much bigger than Texas: By investing in one statewide newsroom, NPR and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting were betting on a collaborative reporting model as “a prototype for the way stations throughout the country can share resources and produce more of the journalism their communities need.”
Five years later, the one-newsroom prototype has grown to five collaborative newsrooms across the country, with newsrooms added in California, the Gulf States, the Midwest, and, most recently, New England.1 Now, a $5.5 million investment over three years from philanthropists Eric Schmidt (a former tech executive) and Wendy Schmidt (a former journalist who also worked in marketing communications in Silicon Valley), announced on Wednesday, will fund a significant expansion of the network.
By year’s end, NPR will establish a new regional newsroom in Appalachia and strengthen the existing Mountain West News Bureau public media collaboration, bringing its total number of collaborative regional newsrooms up to seven (consistent with a plan first shared in a February board meeting). The hefty investment will also fund expansions of both the California and Midwest newsrooms (which were seeded with a $4.7 million grant from the Schmidts in 2020), and create a short-form video pilot among the New England News Collaborative.
NPR declined to specify how much of the $5.5 million will flow to each of these regions and initiatives (NPR senior vice president and editor-in-chief Edith Chapin told me, “We are still working on specifics, so we consider it best not to comment publicly until that is firmed up.”)
In the network’s five years of growth, “this type of regional collaboration has allowed us to pool resources to create editorial positions that each of the partner stations couldn’t support alone,” Chapin told me in an email. In the Gulf States newsroom, for instance, the regional newsroom structure created the possibility to hire six regional beat reporters (focused on beats including economic mobility; justice, incarceration and gun violence; and sports and culture) and a community engagement reporter “whose work is shared by all the partner stations,” creating “coverage that wouldn’t exist otherwise,” Chapin said.
The collaborative structure results in more local and regional reporting reaching national audiences, and helps NPR take the pulse of national stories by picking up on “patterns and trends — similar stories that pop up in different regions,” Chapin said, which member station and national NPR reporters work on together.
The collaborative newsrooms have already generated work with impact. Chapin pointed to a story about inadequate oversight for mental illness in California nursing homes by the California regional newsroom, LAist, and APM Research Lab resulting in lawmakers questioning state and county agencies. Similarly, in the Gulf States newsroom, she cited the Utility Bill of the Month series as especially impactful, resulting in bills reduced by thousands for some sources. In terms of successes with readers, meanwhile, she said the open and click-through rates of the Texas newsroom’s bicultural newsletter, Oye Texas, indicates that it “is resonating with readers.”
The collaborative structure can have economic benefits as well, according to Chapin. In Texas, the regional newsroom produces six live statewide newscasts per weekday broadcast across 27 public radio stations, which brings in “underwriting dollars that wouldn’t come in otherwise.” Regional newsrooms have also benefited from “grants from a variety of philanthropic organizations.” (That’s significant at a time when NPR is grappling with falling revenue and a shrinking audience.)
In its short-form video coverage so far, the NENC has learned that “coverage of nature, environment and the outdoors is visually compelling and a big topic of interest for our public media stations in New England,” Princell told me. That can mean both feel-good stories about “the joy and wonder of being in nature,” and reporting about the threats to health posed by climate change. The collaborative saw “notable audience growth around the 2024 total eclipse, and this summer, we’re seeing a lot of success with social videos tied to our New England Day Trips series.”
The pilot is “an opportunity that builds up our station journalists’ skills in short-form video, and allows us to share best practices on how newsrooms can sustainably integrate video and visuals in the ways we tell stories,” Princell said. While they will further refine specific goals in the next few weeks, “reaching younger and more diverse audiences is a significant part of our strategy in public media,” she said.
“Across the board we’ve witnessed the adoption of short form video as a primary entertainment and information source,” Chapin said. NPR’s Instagram channel, for instance, “has seen triple digit growth in audience and engagement over the last couple of years with a daily audience rivaling our website’s.”
At its core, the Collaborative Journalism Network is NPR’s effort to prioritize and strengthen its local reporting — and do its part to help fill the growing local news voids across the country. “We have all seen the statistics about the decline in local news and we know the effects that has in a community,” Chapin said. “In the five years since we started working on these regional collaborations, we have seen results in terrific local journalism coming out of them, in the news gathering process and in the impact these stories have had locally.”
