News organizations are difficult partners

Nieman Journalism Lab reporting
Editor’s note: It’s easy to get people to talk about their successes. Getting people to talk about projects that haven’t gone well is harder.
That’s why I was happy to see Jeff Reifman of NewsCloud open up about how their recently concluded Knight Foundation grant didn’t deliver what they’d have hoped. Reifman’s final report discusses the difficulties their project — which aimed to partner with news organizations to build online communities around Facebook — faced. Some are familiar complaints: difficulties getting buy-in from large news outlets; struggles to interact with their technology side; and problems dealing with a shifting underlying platform (in this case, Facebook).
Reifman is writing from his perspective, obviously, and the news orgs he worked with would likely have a different take — but he does try to note some of the complaints his partners raised here too. For others who’ve tried to partner with news organizations — or who’ve been on the other side — anything in here look familiar? If you’re starting out on a project of this sort, I’d recommend giving NewsCloud’s report a read to get one take on some of the problems you might face.
http://www.niemanlab.org/2011/04/the-challenge-of-partnerships-newscloud-looks-back-on-a-knight-funded-project-that-didnt-pan-out/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+NiemanJournalismLab+(Nieman+Journalism+Lab)