Local newsrooms are our jam.

When the COVID lockdowns began in my home state of New Hampshire, normal news-gathering ground to a halt. Reporters couldn't travel. Newsrooms suddenly needed stories that they could not produce.

The Granite State News Collaborative, led by Melanie Plenda, stepped in to help newsrooms solve that problem through story sharing. Bringing together for-profit and non-profit newsrooms, the Collaborative helped strenghten the local news ecosystem against the profound shocks of COVID-era budget cuts. Newsrooms that had long competed with each other decided that a little editorial cooperation was required -- and sometimes it actually strengthened every newsrooms' bottom line. Soon the newsrooms were sharing more than 30 stories per day with each other, and they've continued doing that for most of the last six years.

The lessons I learned working with Melanie in NH are baked into everything we build. And now that we're a scrappy squad of four, we've had the opportunity to build on that experience through conversations with hundreds of newsrooms across the country. If you run a scrappy little newsroom, or if you wish you and your peers could collaborate better, we would be delighted to work with you.