By Massarah Mikati

You’re a news outlet serving communities of color, and you were just approached by a mainstream, predominantly white media organization for a partnership or collaboration. Maybe they told you they’re trying to improve their outreach and engagement in communities of color, and specifically, the communities your outlet is dedicated to serving. What should you do?

We spoke to leaders across the BIPOC news industry about the do’s, don’ts and key things to consider when entering into a partnership with mainstream media. Here’s what they had to say:

Conduct a needs assessment

When first being approached by a major news outlet for a partnership, excitement can take hold of you. Sara Lomax, co-founder of URL Media and CEO and president of WURD Radio, warns to not let that consume you.

“It’s really important for the BIPOC media organization to do a needs assessment,” she said. “Go into it with a clear set of expectations and goals that are going to further your business.”

Do you want to try to publish your work through a different format, such as audio or video? Do you want to grow your audience? 

When done well, Lomax said, such partnerships can evolve into symbiotic relationships with aligned goals of audience growth — for the mainstream organizations to develop credibility in communities they’ve historically harmed, and for BIPOC outlets to achieve greater reach and awareness.

Operate from power

“Too often, there is this uneven power dynamic where the bigger outlet is approaching the smaller outlet in a ‘You should be grateful to work with us’ [way],” Lomax said. “So it’s really important for the BIPOC outlet to understand what they are bringing to the table.”

And what BIPOC outlets bring to the table is plentiful: a level of trust and authenticity with their communities that’s unmatched, and a constant reliability in surfacing issues important to their communities before any other outlet is aware of them. BIPOC outlets are in community with their communities — and that is the power you bring to any table, and the point to build from.

 

(Check out Documented’s private prisons coverage here.)

Assess your potential partner’s level of commitment

Numerous reports and studies have shown that the racial reckoning across the journalism industry in 2020 hasn’t stuck, whether that be a lack of funding for BIPOC media outlets or failed “diversity” initiatives within mainstream news outlets. It’s no surprise, then, that partnerships with BIPOC media outlets could also take a hit.

That’s why Lomax and S. Mitra Kalita, CEO of URL Media and publisher of Epicenter-NYC, suggest BIPOC media outlets evaluate two things when approached for a partnership with mainstream media:

• First, determine where the initiative is emanating from within the organization — is there buy-in from the highest levels of the organization? And does that buy-in come with purse strings for resources to support the collaboration?
• Second, determine what the intent is behind the partnership offer. Most often, Kalita said, mainstream outlets approach BIPOC outlets in search of diversified content or audiences, offering “exposure” in return. Aside from the insult, Kalita says the assumption shows a baseline misunderstanding of BIPOC news outlets’ priorities — being rooted in service to communities — thereby creating an inherent flaw at the start of partnerships because intentions are not aligned.

Establish clear rules of engagement

There are significant differences between the ways BIPOC news outlets and mainstream media function, including their approaches to journalism and community engagement — and those differences may arise, and turn into tension, in a partnership or collaboration. That’s why it’s important to know whom you will be working with, establish clear rules of engagement going into a partnership and determine what your deal breakers are.

💡Try this: If you’re approached for a partnership by a mainstream media outlet, think through a worst-case scenario of how that partnership may play out. What are the potential issues that come to mind? How could they be avoided? Use that scenario-planning to ask important questions and lay out expectations in your next meeting with your potential partner.

Recognize different ideas of success

When Kalita was working at CNN, the daily news agenda was based on what was trending on Twitter or Facebook — essentially, a reactive news ecosystem built on scale. But BIPOC outlets’ news agendas are based on what community members are telling you they need. Similarly, while the definition of successful growth for mainstream media may look like the number of page clicks or a story going viral, success for BIPOC outlets is measured by impact.

“We all want to grow our audience, but the traditional metrics of growth are at odds with what defines us and actually makes us successful,” Kalita says.

That’s why URL Media created a Currency of Impact tracker, which ties in a variety of metrics such as individuals’ knowledge of important issues or content being used to support movement building, to keep your organization’s growth aligned with your community’s needs.

“Impact for us is front and center of why we do what we do,” Kalita said.

Don’t lose sight of your audience

With growth can come quality control issues. If growth is an outcome you’d like to achieve through a partnership with mainstream media, be sure to remain clear on who your core audience is and keep your focus on your mission to benefit your community. But it’s also important not to limit yourself with a narrow mindset.

“I come back to, our communities are not monolithic,” Lomax said, emphasizing that there are always opportunities to target more of your community that you may have not already reached when partnering with mainstream media — “as long as you’re not code switching or gentrifying your content to appeal to an audience that is inconsistent.”

Be prepared to walk away

Perhaps your values are not aligned, the relationship becomes extractive or your goals are not synergistic. Whatever it may be, in the chance that a worse-case scenario, or something close to it, pans out, be prepared to walk away from the partnership.

How partnership can benefit the communities you serve when it comes to elections coverage

When it comes to elections coverage, no doubt you’ve seen mainstream outlets get their reporting very wrong when it comes to reporting on the communities you serve. Common mistakes are portraying a demographic (E.g., “the Latinx vote,” “the Black vote,” “the Native vote”) as a monolith, flattening the dimensions of our identities and experiences or failing to represent our perspectives with nuance and humanization. 

It may not directly benefit your news outlet to bring mainstream news more complex and embodied stories of differences of your community. But when thinking about voters who consume the mainstream news, a partnership could help reach voters in the communities you serve who haven’t yet found your outlet, or voters outside those communities be more attuned to the experiences and needs of folks they may not be in relationship with. So at the end of the day, if voters think beyond which candidate best serves their needs, and broaden their scope to how any candidate may help or harm other communities, that can be an impact win (albeit a very hard one to track). 

Voter guides and candidate interviews

One more opportunity to consider when partnering with mainstream outlets, is access to people in power or candidates who are running who may not be answering emails to sit for an interview — be that for your newsroom or for the mainstream outlet. If you’re able to collaborate with reporters from other outlets and share access with one another for interviewing candidates or politicians, you can help ensure your community’s information needs are represented in the questions and answers, and publish the responses to questions that most impact the people you’re serving. In addition, if your outlet serves non-English speaking audiences, your translated materials into community members’ native tongue can help them better understand candidates and vote with more information. 

Sidenote: you may not want to take on responsibility to share access to candidates who are open to speaking to your newsroom but not other outlets, and that’s a totally reasonable way to go, too. Access is often earned, and it may not always be appropriate to share it.  

What else have you tried and recommend? 

We’d love to hear if you or your outlet has had any successes with approaches not mentioned in this guide, so we can help expand the possibilities for how BIPOC newsrooms can leverage media partnerships for the outcomes they care most about.