I am excited that the Oregon News Incubator and the Sentinel are continuing on with their office and content collaboration.

Through this arrangement, experienced writers and media producers can get 24-hour access to the Sentinel’s newsroom, either through direct rent payment — starting at $40 a month — or through taking assignments for the Sentinel’s online news service. The office share provides writers and media producers the resources of a newsroom with the camaraderie, casual peer review and free flow exchange of ideas that can only occur in a real space. For the Sentinel this is an opportunity to continue to deliver news service to one of Portland’s most under-served communities. While this publication continues to look for sustainable models, this partnership is vitally important to the publication’s mission to deliver quality news to a part of town that usually gets ignored.

In my view, since November of last year folks in the professional media, the community media and independent media producers have been involved a very unique communal discussion about the future of journalism and the question of a new non-profit news organization here in town. Organizations and groups, like Digital Journalism Portland, We Make the Media, ONI, Portland Media Lab, the Sentinel, OPB, The Columbian, the Oregonian and the Mercury and many more have been part of the conversation. That’s great. But I say less conversation and more “demonstration.”

I also hope that an ONI/Sentinel partnership might show to others what an active experiment in a collaborative newsroom might look like and demonstrate one locally innovative way in which independent news producers can work with an existing publication.

If you’d like to be part of this exciting experiment in news innovation, please contact ONI’s space coordinator at mike.andersen@gmail.com. Or learn more at ONI’s Web site or listen to ONI’s interview on PDX.fm’s Redoing Media show.

thanks

Cornelius