The nonprofit news site Charlottesville Tomorrow shares its reporting with the local newspaper. Here's how they've made the partnership last

• The Challenge: Confronted with diminished resources, The Daily Progress, a newspaper in Charlottesville, Va., publishes stories produced by Charlottesville Tomorrow, a local nonprofit news outlet.• The Strategy: The outlets share story budgets each week and will divide up events and meetings that each will cover.

• The Numbers: More than 2,300 Charlottesville Tomorrow stories have been published by The Daily Progress.

• The Lessons: Collaborations require trust and transparency, but the learnings and influence can extend beyond the initial partnership.

• The Future: The publications are hoping to deepen their relationship and collaborate in new ways.

• Want to know more?: Read past coverage of the partnership and learn how other news organizations are collaborating and sharing coverage

Now, let’s dig in a little deeper:

If you’ve read a copy of The Daily Progress, the local newspaper in Charlottesville, Va., anytime since 2009, then more likely than not you’ve also read coverage from the nonprofit site Charlottesville Tomorrow. The two publications have a novel arrangement: The paper republishes Charlottesville Tomorrow’s stories in print and online, with a link back to the nonprofit’s own site.

Launched in 2005, Charlottesville Tomorrow’s mission is to cover what it calls “quality of life issues” in the city. It focuses on topics such as land use, transportation, education, and affordable living. It doesn’t stray from those coverage areas.

By 2009, The Daily Progress was facing the same issues that virtually every newspaper has faced – shrinking revenues and limited resources. Then-managing editor McGregor McCance came to Charlottesville Tomorrow with the idea to partner.

The nonprofit agreed “without much hesitation,” Charlottesville Tomorrow executive director Brian Wheeler recalled. In exchange for sharing coverage, the paper printed a voter guide on behalf of Charlottesville Tomorrow and gave it advertising space in the paper and online. The Daily Progress has offered other in-kind benefits over the years too.

BH Media Group, a subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway, acquired the paper in 2012, and publisher Rob Jiranek, who joined the paper in 2016, told me that there were some questions at the time about the deal.

“When I got here, there were some question marks about Charlottesville Tomorrow: What is this? Who are they? Why are we doing this? Those kinds of questions. Which I was able to answer because I knew Brian and had background on Charlottesville Tomorrow,” Jiranek said. “The way I’ve always looked at it is that it’s an incredible gift. Charlottesville Tomorrow makes us a better newspaper. They’re doing coverage that both broadens and deepens our beat coverage of the community.”

The partnership continues today, with Charlottesville Tomorrow stories appearing almost daily in the paper. The arrangement has persisted even as the paper, in that time, has had two owners, three publishers, and four managing editors. And now it will withstand a transition at Charlottesville Tomorrow as Wheeler, who has been with the site since the beginning, is leaving this month.

What has made the partnership so successful, and how has this one-of-a-kind arrangement lasted nearly a decade?

• Give different perspectives a chance Partnerships and collaboration are increasingly common in the journalism world, but it’s rare to see two organizations collaborate for as long as Charlottesville Tomorrow and The Daily Progress.

Trust, a willingness to look at situations from new perspectives, and ultimately the desire to put the community first have contributed to the long-term nature of the deal, Wheeler and Jiranek said.

A corporate-owned newspaper took a risk subcontracting some of its core coverage to a small nonprofit newsroom, but they felt enough of a responsibility to the community that they decided the partnership was worth the extra work.

For Charlottesville Tomorrow, it was critical that the paper didn’t view it as a competitor. It also helped that Wheeler’s background isn’t in journalism. He was previously a member of the local school board and was most interested making sure the community was informed.

Many people who start small local startup news organizations previously worked at newspapers and may have hold-ups about working with the outlets where they used to work.

“The idea of partnering with their old employer to do things better is not high on their list of go-to solutions. That’s what I’ve realized,” Wheeler said. “There’s built-in friction and a wall between the people who lost their job at the newspaper and then the newspaper being willing to outsource part of its newsroom. They feel a responsibility that the news that’s in their paper is theirs — they wrote it, they can vouch for it, etc.”

At first blush, if a partnership (or any other idea, really) doesn’t seem like it’ll work for your organization, try looking at it from a different perspective. What would an outsider think? This type of thinking might change how you approach opportunities.

• Stay focused Charlottesville Tomorrow doesn’t deviate from its core beats, and it regularly delivers on producing smart coverage.

“It really comes down to clear expectations and good communication, which is no surprise,” Wheeler said. “If we weren’t clearly communicating on what our plan was and then delivering on those expectations, and we were a source of frustration as opposed to enrichment for the newspaper, then they would have passed on renewing this. Likewise, if we kept giving them content and they were unable to print it, and they kept saying no to our stories, we’d say fine.”

And because The Daily Progress knows exactly what it’s getting from Charlottesville Tomorrow, it’s able to use its limited resources to cover other angles that it might not be able to otherwise.

• Extended influence: Charlottesville Tomorrow takes a holistic approach to the way it covers the topics it focuses on. For instance, one of its core issues is land use, which encompasses everything from affordable housing and retail development to public infrastructure projects.

Having seen what’s worked for Charlottesville Tomorrow, The Daily Progress is now trying to rework its own business coverage in a similar way by focusing on issues that affect all types of businesses in their coverage area.

So even when partners aren’t directly collaborating on a project, gaining exposure to how others approach their reporting can help news organizations rethink and optimize their own operations.

“Pretty quickly I came to see that Charlottesville Tomorrow is doing business in a way that is more specific than we have conventionally done business,” Jiranek said. “I think that our business coverage is improving and will continue to improve. It’s not just because it’s supplemented by Charlottesville Tomorrow but also because it’s influenced by Charlottesville Tomorrow.”

• Super fans are your best resource: Direct reader revenue is becoming increasingly important for news organizations — especially local publishers. (If you’ve been reading Solution Set, you know this is a theme we keep coming back to.)

The people who give news organizations money are their most loyal consumers, and providing additional and higher quality coverage gives them more value. They can be your best advocates and also can help attract new supporters.

In a college town like Charlottesville there are a lot of avid news consumers, and this partnership helps both outlets serve that contingent. It makes a Daily Progress subscription more valuable with added coverage and also helps Charlottesville Tomorrow solicit supporters and gain more publicity.

“The reader that’s at the center of the bell curve, is the donor and supporter and über reader of Charlottesville Tomorrow,” Jiranek said. “That’s a really interesting thing. You have voracious news consumers, and in Charlottesville, they subscribe to The Daily Progress and read Charlottesville Tomorrow habitually.”

Early on in the partnership, both parties recognized that they weren’t in competition and were both benefiting from the affiliation with one another.

“We would not be here today, in my opinion, without this partnership,” Wheeler said. “We would’ve folded. We just wouldn’t have been able to raise the resources each year.”