A new guide to implementing practices that care for, and center, journalists in news organizations

The Appeal and the Reynolds Journalism Institute are thrilled to announce a new resource for news leaders and entrepreneurs: The Care & Collaboration Toolkit. This toolkit serves as a practical resource for news organizations who want to better support their journalists and include them in the decisions that impact their lives and work.

The Appeal team put a lot of time, energy, and research into making The Appeal what it is today: a democratic, worker-led, care-centered newsroom. We love advising newsroom leaders and watching more worker-led nonprofit outlets launch every year, but we often hear from people that they could never apply how we work in their newsrooms. So, we set out to break down our practices and policies and make them adaptable to all sorts of news organizations. 

Whether newsrooms are looking to be fully worker-led (we included a startup checklist for any budding news entrepreneurs out there looking to off our model from scratch) or are seeking guidance on a specific practice like setting better compensation policies or minimizing journalist burnout, The Care & Collaboration Toolkit is a resource for journalists and newsroom leaders interested in putting new ideas into practice.

Join us for a webinar Tuesday December 10 at 12pm CT where we’ll walk you through the toolkit and how you can adapt it for your newsroom, or even just your team.

Each part of the toolkit provides in-depth guides with templates, checklists, draft language, and how-tos, but the common themes are putting the values of equity, transparency and care into practice both with staff and how The Appeal has engaged with stakeholders externally. 

The toolkit includes resources for:

1. Practicing democratic decision-making: We use decision-making frameworks like RACI to get input and sign off from journalists in our newsroom on big decisions that affect them. Even if it’s unlikely that your newsroom will change who makes big decisions, using these frameworks to make the implicit explicit can be very beneficial. We offer a worksheet to help begin building these frameworks out, and also explain how a Board of Directors can be set up to empower staff with more decision-making authority.

2. Setting a thriving compensation model: We looked at more than 20 models and turned our values into a compensation philosophy, before eventually deciding on a model that was fully transparent with four tiers, each with a flat ‘Thriving Wage’. This section is filled with links to resources to find the best model that works for you.

3. Minimizing burnout We share how we use Slack channels, time off policies, meeting-free time, and biannual holiday shutdowns to encourage people to care for themselves. We also go into detail about how newsrooms can use Reflection Sessions to encourage teams to identify and resolve structural issues affecting morale.

The toolkit also includes a wide variety of issues — from building a Board of Directors and picking vendors to working with incarcerated freelance writers — that we thoughtfully infused with our values for newsrooms to utilize! 

We hope these resources are useful to newsrooms who are rethinking how their outlets can better engage their communities and support their journalists.

Cite this article

Chan, Tara Francis and Greene, Molly (2024, Dec.5). The Care & Collaboration Toolkit. Reynolds Journalism Institute. Retrieved from: https://rjionline.org/news/the-care-amp-collaboration-toolkit/