#MergerMondays: CalMatters + The Markup
Nonprofit News collaborations are more important than ever.
It’s officially election week.🗳️
This calls for a reflection on all of the #nonprofitnews organizations that are navigating collaboration and restructuring as they try to keep their heads above water to continue serving honest and trustworthy news to their communities. 📰I dove into the #MergerMondays archives and read through our past examples of collaborations for good among nonprofit news organizations.
Some examples like the Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service and Wisconsin Watch coming together to bring trusted news to all and Rhode Island PBS and The Public’s Radio collaborating to provide better access to honest journalism provide hope for the direction in which nonprofit news orgs are moving. 🏋️♂️
The collaboration of CalMatters and The Markup, a local and a national nonprofit newsroom, is not only an example of a strong partnership, but also a call for more mergers, acquisitions and consolidations in the nonprofit news space. Neil Chase, CEO of CalMatters, postures that he doesn’t think “we’ve seen enough yet.”
This article about the collaboration is a great example of the reasoning behind a collaboration and the thoughtful steps taken throughout the process. I earlier likened nonprofit mergers to the process of dating and eventually getting married, something that The Markup CEO Nabiha Syed also referenced in discussing their merger with CalMatters. Syed explains that mergers make “good business sense if the partners are a good fit. And that’s always the big question: ‘Are the partners a good fit?’”
Nieman Lab explores the journey that these organizations took to find each other and how they eventually decided it was a match. The steps both organizations took to discuss with each other, with their employees and with stakeholders about how and why the partnership makes sense is certainly an example worth learning from.
Consolidation in nonprofit news is increasing across the country - local news has been hit especially hard and could benefit from collaborative agreements regionally even if not pursuing full on merger. 🗞️ My hope is that examples like this will continue to inspire nonprofits to come to strengthen the industry rather than continuing to try spreading already thin resources even thinner.
Chase of CalMatters put it very well: “I think consolidation is natural. I think it’s important. And I think you’re going to see more of it where it makes sense…This is two organizations that would have been ok on their own but I think will be better off together.” 💪
