Washington newspaper rivals collaborate for online flood coverage
Journalists used news link service Publish2 to share and republish competitors' stories
– 2 min read
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Journalists reporting extreme flooding in western Washington have put aside traditional rivalries to publish links to each other's stories on their papers' sites.
The collaboration, which used a shared group and widget provided by the link journalism site, Publish2, started with a Twitter message from a rival
assistant editor of dynamic media at Sound Publishing (publisher of PNWLocalNews.com ) told Journalism.co.uk.
Contact via Twitter by new media editor at the Everett Herald, Elaine Helm prompted Balcerak to suggest that journalists could group flood-related messages under a common hashtag ( \#waflood ).
"We sent that out to all our respective followers and watched it catch on," Balcerak said.
PNWLocalNews.com had seen earlier success from using Publish2 for coverage on a snowstorm, when director of new media at Sound Publishing, Seth Long, collaborated with Angela Dice , new media editor at another competitor, the Kitsap Sun.
Using the service, they linked stories in a shared group and published them via a widget to their websites - an effort which Publish2 editor Josh Korr thinks could have been the first example
of 'networked link journalism'.
"We got a ton of traffic from it. I figured, why not do it again?" said Balcerak.
"Things are going pretty well this time, too. I think our web users appreciated that we offered them a 'one-stop shop' for information during a time when it was - arguably - desperately needed." In a blog post Publish2 editor Josh Korr
called the use of its service 'a quiet revolution'.
"[T]hose four journalists weren’t in the same newsroom. In fact, they all work for different media companies. And here’s the best part: some of them have never even met in person," said Korr.
'It's only natural that journalism on the web should become more collaborative,' Scott Karp, co-founder and CEO of Publish2 told Journalism.co.uk.
The traditional wire service was effectively a co-op, he said, where newsrooms both contributed and benefited.
Online collaborative tools like Publish2 and Twitter, alongside linking, mean that 'collaboration can be much more dynamic and informal,' Karp said, adding that these tools are also free to use.
"In an age of shrinking newsroom resources and the shift to digital media, I think notions of competition and rivalry in journalism will increasingly fall by the wayside as newsrooms are forced to become more efficient and shift their center of gravity to the web's fundamentally social medium.
"To survive and thrive in the digital era, journalists are going to have to help each other - the web provides a perfect platform for creating a powerful journalism network that could rival the old local monopoly as a means of distribution and support," Karp said.
Examples of the linking can be found at the Herald site , PNWLocalNews.com , the Kitsap Sun site , and Wenatchee World.com .
