Will the kinds of news collaborations discussed in chapter 2 continue? How might they change in the future?

Collaborations will continue and will become more common. But they will be more likely for certain kinds of journalism than others.

Nonprofit news organizations, like ProPublica, have led the way in partnering with major newspapers like the New York Times and the Washington Post. Newspapers in Ohio are sharing content of statewide concern. Local newspapers and radio stations are collaborating with each other more frequently on items like news, TV, and, weather. It's obvious that this trend toward collaboration and sharing, as opposed to competition and "scoops," is important. But will it last?

It's important to keep in mind that collaboration is still a minority practice within the news industry. The Washington

Post and the New York Times still aggressively compete, and the papers express quiet dismay when one paper scoops the other. The New York Post and the New York Daily News act the same way when it comes to city news. Interorganizational competition is buried deeply within the DNA of most modern news organizations, and it is unlikely that these tendencies will change overnight.

But it seems clear that collaborations will become more and more important. The near-immediate accessibility of content on the Internet makes beating your competitor seem less important to the people who read the news, if not always the people who make it. The fact that so many people access news stories through web platforms like Google, Twitter, and Facebook means that they often don't even know the outlets responsible for producing that content. The technological ability to collaborate across institutions is obviously more possible in the twenty-first century than the twentieth. And, the relatively diminished economic standing of the traditional news business means that there will be an economic incentive to work together as well.

Certain types of collaboration will thrive while others will either diminish or never get off the ground. We can expect the most common collaborations to involve a certain type of investigative reporting, in which institutional practices of governments or corporations are exposed by a team of reporters at different news outlets. Less formal, more organic, and less frequent "collaborations" will probably occur during breaking news events, usually involving journalistic organizations linking to other organizations' news and reposting their once original content.

There are probably elements of news production that will never be collaborative—these relate to certain forms of investigative journalism, ones that involve the exposure of hidden and deceitful deeds by individuals, rather than patterns of corruption at institutions. In other words, for the foreseeable future, we should expect some collaborations to work better than others.