Surfacing deserving stories to share becomes easier

Now that we know audiences don’t want to hear the “democracy is in distress” mantra but clamor for local news, our industry will embrace tools that help amplify the impact of beat reporters.

This is the year — overdue — when news organizations will prioritize community over competition and cooperate more effectively.

Some regional alliances use Slack, internal tools or clunky email threads with other editors — avoiding double-booking reporters on daily staple news or place a harried call to a contact, asking, “Hey, can I use the story that led your paper today?”

We can’t afford pack journalism anymore.

Now is the time to think bigger, taking advantage of collaborative tools like the PluckyWorks platform, a fledgling centralized wire service of sorts that already has more than a half-dozen groups sharing content, including The Conversation and the Granite State News Cooperative. Plucky is also integrating the collective work of the Murrow Local News fellows.

In Washington, the state-funded reporting program I manage has 16 fellows serving 22 news organizations around the state; all of their bylined stories — nearly 2,700 in the first 20 months — are to be available via Creative Commons to any publication.

But stories deserving to be amplified beyond a particular city’s limits can be hard to find despite newsletters, visits to regional sites, or word of mouth.

Founder Johnny Bassett and his Plucky team have battled platform peculiarities to identify RSS feeds that create a portal for news editors to snag stories (with photos and graphics) relevant to their communities.

This tool, among others like Dave Gehring’s Distribute Media Lab or INN’s Find Your News, pool reporting that can better serve our communities.

We can’t rely on AI-powered apps or serendipity to keep residents informed about critical and complicated issues. It’s time for all of us professional communicators to communicate using advancing tools.