David Cohn sums up a session on newsroom collaboration at the recent Future of Civic Media conference at MIT:

Collaboration is a buzzword in journalism. As a result, some of its meaning gets lost, similar to how “social media” can mean just about anything and nothing. Scott Rosenberg summed up the problem very well: There is a professional transition in the field from an environment where competition was the dominant mode of interacting with other organizations to an era where dividing labor and sharing might serve the public better.

To clarify what constitutes collaboration among newsrooms, the group defined several examples with specific benefits:

• Some collaborations save resources (so not everyone has to file Freedom of Information Act requests).
• Some collaborations can enable new forms of journalism (such as distributed reporting across many organizations on a single topic).
• Some collaborations can reach new audiences.
• Some collaborations don’t treat people like “audiences” but as collaborators.
• There is also collaboration with syndication, as is being done by California Watch.

Cohn says the big question participants were thinking about by the session’s conclusion deals with the institutional role in facilitating collaboration:

Do we need institutions to help facilitate collaboration between institutions? Or should it be more organic? It is probably not an either/or, but these two are fundamental questions that underpinned the discussion.