How Grist approaches partnerships

At Grist, we make the vast majority of our reporting available to other news outlets to republish. That’s because as a nonprofit newsroom, we want our journalism to reach as far as possible. As our CEO Nikhil Swaminathan says, we’re “platform agnostic.”

There are a few ways we partner with other newsrooms on our journalism.

Syndications

Like many other nonprofit newsrooms, we make our stories available to republish, and we include a republishing icon on our stories that makes it easier to copy the text over into a CMS. 

We also participate in a number of initiatives in which we share our stories for syndication. We’re a member of Climate Desk, a group of national and international newsrooms that share content that can be republished. We participate in Covering Climate Now, and make our stories available through their syndication program. We have our own Global Indigenous Affairs Desk Slack channel where we share stories that can be syndicated with other outlets. We’re also a part of the Climate News Task Force.

In addition to making our own stories available to syndicate, we also republish content from other newsrooms; you’ll often find partner content on our site on weekends.

Typically, we get several dozen syndications a week, and hope that number will continue to grow.

Co-publishing

For accountability and long-form stories, we often search for newsrooms that want to be publishing partners. This means that we both publish the same story (or versions of the same story) at the same time – usually one that has been independently reported out by a Grist reporter. We seek out these types of partnerships when we are hoping to get a story in front of a specific audience.

For example, we published a major investigation with the Houston Chronicle and the Beaumont Enterprise to try to get the story in front of the people affected by the air pollution we detailed in the story. (Note: Both outlets ran an abridged version of the story that ran in Grist.) We also co-published a story about tech lobbying with investigative tech outlet The Markup, and another on California’s truck electrification race with KCET, the public media station in Los Angeles.

Co-reporting

We value collaboration and frequently work with other newsrooms to report out stories together that we then publish simultaneously. We’ve worked with every type of news outlet on these editorial partnerships, including local outlets like The Desert Sun and El Paso Matters; national outlets like Vox and The Nation; and international outlets such as Foreign Policy and The Asian Dispatch. We’ve also worked with a variety of broadcast partners, and have an ongoing collaboration with NPR’s Here and Now. These types of partnerships have earned us a variety of awards.

Special projects

Through our Local Reporting Initiative, we have seven reporters who report for both Grist and local news outlets in Georgia, Illinois, Louisiana, Michigan, Nebraska, North Carolina, and Utah. Their stories are syndicated in local outlets in each state, and then nationally and internationally through Grist.

We also make big data sets available to newsrooms to report their own stories, as we did for the Misplaced Trust project and our ethylene oxide investigation.

Interested in collaborating with Grist?

• Interested in learning more about syndicating Grist stories? Email syndication@grist.org.
• Want to pitch Grist a story for us to republish on our site? Email me.
• Would your newsroom like to work with Grist on a story? Reach out to us.