Forming Partnerships and Alliances

-- From the Poynter Election Handbook: A Guide to Campaign Coverage, 3rd Edition.

Most citizen-based election projects involve partnerships between print and broadcast news organizations.

The newspapers involved have ranged from big-city dailies to suburban weeklies. The broadcasters have included commercial and public television, cable, and radio stations. Some have had websites. Most media alliances have been local in nature. A few have gone statewide, involving several newspapers and broadcast stations.

Some partnerships have reached beyond the news media. Colleges and universities have provided space for town meetings and students who can conduct research. A public relations group is an active partner in one project, providing experienced event planners to help organize forums and prepare handout materials.

All partnerships must be carefully structured to allow each partner to retain editorial independence and control of its own campaign coverage. The partnership effort is usually limited to polling, issues reports, candidate interviews early in the campaign, and sponsorship of forums or debates.

Add Poynter's Election Handbook to your news organization's resource library. -- Special thanks to the coeditors of the Poynter Election Handbook: Deborah Potter is executive director of NewsLab, a nonprofit television news laboratory that works with local stations to develop new ways of telling complex or non-visual stories. Deborah spent 16 years as a network correspondent for CBS News and CNN, where she covered the White House, State Department, Congress, national politics, and the environment. From 1995 to 1998, she taught journalism at The Poynter Institute and also hosted the PBS program In the Prime. Pete Weitzel is a former managing editor of the Miami Herald and visiting professional at Poynter. He's now a newspaper consultant and lives in Durham, NC.

Partners remain competitors in traditional areas of coverage, and they use material originated as part of the campaign project in ways that suit them individually. Several alliances have developed written protocols. And the partners talk to each other -- a lot.

Some editors, news directors, and reporters initially wondered if collaboration was feasible and, more importantly, questioned if it was desirable. They saw the other local media as competitors for audience, and cross-state newspapers as rivals for professional status. What they found is that these limited partnerships worked, and worked to everyone's advantage.

Some Benefits of Partnerships

Clout
While it's no sure thing, candidates are not likely to ignore a media partnership that reaches a major share of the audience in any important market (to use the broadcast measure), particularly a partnership that is posing questions raised by citizens. Candidates are even less likely to ignore coalitions that reach across an entire state. Veteran Sen. Jesse Helms did in North Carolina in 1996, but his one-term Republican colleague Lauch Faircloth took part in the "Your Voice, Your Vote" interviews in 1998.

Front-runner Bob Dole avoided an interview with "Voices of Florida" reporters in advance of the 1996 GOP primary, but then placed an 11th-hour phone call to one of the political writers to talk issues when told the coalition papers were about to report his refusal alongside the views of his opponents. Two years earlier, a gubernatorial candidate called it "blackmail" when the Florida media partners asked for a three-hour interview on the issues, but he quickly agreed.

So did the five others running. In San Francisco, the threat of white space and dead air got a quick response from a candidate for governor who had been unwilling to provide a position statement. And when a citizen-questioner at a Wisconsin "We the People" project forum asked gubernatorial candidates for a written proposal "in the next two weeks" on how to solve a knotty budget problem, all met the deadline.

Cross promotion
Media partnerships give each member's coverage more visibility and more influence. Partnerships that use the same title and logo for stories developed by the alliance can easily offer readers and viewers cross-references to coverage in other media. These cross-promotional efforts cost virtually nothing, and they expand both newspaper readership and broadcast audience. In Boston, the Globe listed times for reports on WBUR (the public radio station) and WBZ-TV. In Seattle, each partner was mentioned every time an article appeared in the Times or a segment ran on KPLU-FM or KUOW-FM. In Wisconsin, all partners used the "We the People" logo. And each keyed to the others' informational reports leading up to the town hall meetings. In North Carolina, the newspaper partners ran Friday and Saturday morning boxes promoting television partner programming those evenings and their own Sunday packages.

The TV news reports prominently mentioned the Sunday morning newspaper reports. And public radio reports called attention to both the TV and newspapers features.

Cost sharing
One of the first questions any news manager asks is, "What will it cost?" Polls, focus groups, forums, and town hall meetings cost money. Splitting those costs with someone helps. Making campaign coverage a multimedia, citizen-based effort can result in promotional dollars being available to pay for things such as forums as well as community relation staffs helping with logistics. A partnership also has more power to solicit sponsors that can defray much of the project's cost, as has been done with "We the People" in Wisconsin. In multi-newspaper partnerships, circulation is used to determine cost share.

Television stations have used market size. Local TV-newspaper partnership arrangements vary. The Pew Center for Civic Journalism and the Radio and Television News Directors Foundation (RTNDF) provided financial help on some partnership projects. The "We the People" project in Wisconsin has had corporate underwriting of some of the costs.

Resource sharing
News managers quickly discover talented people working for their partners who can help make the project go better in ways their own staffs could not. For the print journalist, that may be a television director who can handle the technical problems of a citizens' forum, or someone from the community relations department who can organize focus groups. For the broadcast journalist, it may be a newspaper reporter experienced at thorough analysis of polling data. Partners also can share the work of compiling a database of citizens who can serve as potential sources for reporters. And they can expand their cooperation as the campaign goes on. Toward the hectic end of the Florida gubernatorial primary in 1994, several Florida papers agreed to informally expand their "issues only" coalition to the sharing of daily news coverage in an effort to fully staff the field of candidates.

Keys to Making Partnerships Work

Trust, but verify
In some cases, partners may trust each other initially. In other cases, trust must be developed in the early meetings. Potential conflicts need to be talked through from the start, and the partners need to reach agreements everyone is comfortable with.

Each alliance needs to decide for itself what will work best. But here are some questions each of the alliance partners we've talked with has asked up front. ¥ What is the scope of the partnership? ¥ Where does the cooperation begin Ð and where does it end? ¥ What resources will each partner commit? ¥ Who will do what? How will they do it? When? ¥ How do we resolve potential competitive conflicts, such as the timing of publication or broadcast of poll results? ¥ How will each partner refer to the project and promote the other?

Answer these questions and others that come up in the early negotiations, and do it in writing. Make sure every participant at each of the member newsrooms has a copy. The understandings can be changed later, if necessary. But having them on paper at the start avoids misunderstandings.

Talk to each other -- constantly
The project leaders at each news organization need to be constantly talking, solving little problems, serving as liaisons on bigger issues. They need to form a close-knit team that cuts through organizational boundaries.

Allow for maximum independence
Partnerships work only when the individual members are comfortable with the arrangement. As a result, election coverage partnerships have many different looks. The Boston partners worked together on planning and coordination, and shared the costs of polling. But they shared little effort on news gathering.

Florida's newspapers worked closely together; two even shared reporters at one point late in the campaign. But the television partners' participation was limited to polling, joint candidate interviewing, and working together on a televised statewide debate. In North Carolina, newspapers formed a partnership and the television stations, because of different network affiliations, then partnered with their local newspapers rather than with each other.

A Few Cautionary Notes

A media partnership puts an additional workload on the people directly responsible within each of the newsrooms. It can also result in added organizational and clerical work, particularly if forums and focus groups are involved. Some newsrooms have tapped community relations or support personnel.

Several of the larger partnerships have brought in coordinators, part or full time. What's critical is that each news organization anticipate the nature and extent of the additional work and provide for it from the start.

The partnerships can also be lightning rods to disappointed candidates, their supporters, and various media commentators. That happened in North Carolina in 1996. U.S. Senate candidate Harvey Gantt praised the media partnership and its issues-based approach during his successful primary run. But when he fell behind in the general election, his aides complained that the newspapers and television stations focused too much on their preset issues and failed to fully report on issues Gantt was raising. That theme was embraced by a few national political writers who came to the state to cover the campaign but decided there was no political story because incumbent Sen. Jesse Helms had a commanding lead. They wrote about media coverage instead. The project's editors and news directors found themselves belatedly defending against criticism that they had diminished democracy rather than advance it as they set out to do and believe they did. The partnership was re-formed to provide issues reports for the 1998 US Senate race, and then again for the 2000 gubernatorial race, although with some partnership changes each time. Alliances aren't forever.

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