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 also have our own Global Indigenous Affairs Desk Slack channel where we share stories that can be syndicated with other outlets.
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 recently 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. This month alone, we worked with Type Investigations, the Bitter Southerner, the Center for Public Integrity, the Daily Yonder, Next City and YR Media, and the Intercept on a variety of stories. Last year, one of our collaborations — a story with Coast Alaska on the Tongass National Forest — won an ONA award.
Special projects
As I wrote about earlier this month, we will soon have three regional reporting networks in Georgia, Illinois, and Michigan. Each reporter will work for both us and the local NPR station, and we’ll syndicate their stories throughout each state.
We also have several special projects coming up, including two reporting projects from which we plan to make data available to other newsrooms. Stay tuned for more information.
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.
