International news case study: Common Language Project

Another nonprofit model serving up international reporting is The Common Language Project, which bills itself as a multimedia production house that provides news “about the people affected by key social justice issues, with a specific focus on stigmatized regions and peoples underrepresented in the traditional media” (Common Language Project, n.d.).

Common Language’s small core reporting team, consisting of its three founding members Sarah Stuteville, Alex Stonehill and Jessica Partnow, seeks projects that deal with topics such as human rights, gender equality, social and economic justice, immigration, education and environmental issues. They produce written articles, blogs and video and radio pieces, post them on their Web site (www.commonlanguageproject.net) and sell the use of their works to for-profit media, and, on a sliding rate scale, to nonprofit media.

Common Language was launched in 2006, after Stuteville, Stonehill and Partnow graduated from college and faced a daunting job market. “We were all interested in pursuing careers in journalism, but 2006 was I think probably the year of crisis for the newspaper industry for sure, and kind of the moment when everybody recognized that the jobs were disappearing in journalism and things were going to be changing in some pretty profound ways,” said Sarah Stuteville in a recent interview (S. Stuteville, personal communication, October 5, 2009). Many of the professors in media studies at Hunter College, where Stuteville earned her degree, weren’t sure how to advise students given the market circumstances, she said. Then one of her professors suggested that the best plan might be to just make up the job she wanted, and that suggestion was in part the impetus for Common Language. “It was like, OK, in an ideal world, what sort of job would we want to have and how can we go about trying to make it and see if there’s support out there for it?”

The team saved up money and decided to go out and report from as many places as possible that were in their view either under-reported or reported in a mainly one-dimensional way. That first venture lasted eight months, and took the team to Southeast Asia, Central Asia and the Middle East. They weren’t initially set on producing multimedia work, Stuteville said, but they realized along the way that because they were going to chiefly publish online, they needed to do more than just stories and photos. So they taught themselves how to get audio and video as part of their reporting, and began blogging immediately, she said.

The operation has steadily grown from that time, said Stuteville, using a kind of a hybrid funding model. A recent agreement with the University of Washington secured some operational funding as well as offices and some other resources. In exchange, the Common Language team is teaching some classes, running workshops and operating an internship program. Stuteville said the Common Language team hopes the relationship with the university might evolve, and they’re testing a theory that one way new media projects could incubate and get the support they need is through partnerships with universities.

Common Language also gets funding from a couple of foundations, and earns income from speaking engagements at schools and universities. But most of the project’s income comes from project-specific clients for their international projects as well as local investigative work the team conducts in the Seattle area. Individual contributors and a couple of annual fundraisers provide support as well.

So far, however, the Common Language team members still have to work other part-time jobs to make ends meet. Nonetheless, the team has been able to produce multi-part multimedia reporting packages from East Africa and Pakistan, both with support from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, and they’ve had their work picked up by the likes of PBS's Foreign Exchange with Daljit Dhaliwal, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, PRI’s The World, NPR’s Morning Edition, BBC Wildlife Magazine, Frontline/World and the San Francisco Chronicle.

They also post the work of other multimedia journalists reporting from abroad and working on local investigative projects, and though they cannot fund projects by other journalists, Common Language does accept proposals for collaborative projects, for which Common Language can provide support services such as assistance in obtaining funding and in placing projects with media outlets. The group has also been collaborating with a group of filmmakers in the Seattle area, and worked on a documentary last year on the closing of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

Collaborations are key to Common Language, Stuteville said, and she thinks that’s one direction the news industry is heading. “I feel pretty confident about the way multimedia journalism might work in coming years and generations. I think it’s going to more and more be about collaboration and resource sharing in the sense that you may focus on some specific part of media making or journalism, but you’re constantly working in collaboration with other people to find money, support and to have the expertise to create work.”

Stuteville said each member of Common Language works about 40 hours per week on Common Language projects, in addition to the hours they put into their part-time jobs. They have a collective annual goal of cutting one day of non-Common Language work per week so they can eventually drop the outside jobs. They also are committed to being involved in at least one international project a year, though they would like to do more someday. All of this, and the newly acquired teaching duties, add up to a lot of work for a small staff.

“Trying to figure out how to make a career in the field right now, it just requires that you really, really, really like the work that you do, because there’s very little security in it right now, and even less money,” said Stuteville.

“You have to actually like the nonprofit bureaucracy side as much as you like the reporting side, as much as you like the editing side, as much as you like the collaboration side. And I really do, even though it’s a lot of work, a lot of hours in the week, it’s definitely worth it to me.”