DML is currently taking crowdfunded investments! Invest $100 or more and support our mission to grow new and sustainable revenue streams for news publishers.
Collaborative journalism has become an essential part of the journalism ecosystem, allowing publishers to cover important but underrepresented issues, and helping newsrooms maximize resources by partnering and accessing third party content. Collaborations can free up reporter time to focus on the stories that matter the most to their local communities.
At DML we are proud to provide essential technology platforms to power these collaboratives. We’re passionate about this work which feeds into our double bottom line of impact and revenue, and also supports our mission of making information more accessible through the open web.
Founded in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd, Word in Black is a groundbreaking collaboration between 10 leading Black publishers and the Local Media Association. Select articles from the publications are published on the Word in Black website, where additional editorial content also appears.
DML partners with WIB by providing and partnering on custom content collections which WIB publishers successfully sell advertising and sponsorship against. Through this partnership WIB publishers have raised significant revenue through paid partnerships with AARP, BioGen, Deloitte and others.
Word in Black has received funding from Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Commonwealth Fund, the Google News Initiative, SNPA Foundation and Meta Journalism Project.
The Covering Climate Collaborative is a collaboration between twenty-five local newsrooms, six best-in-class science and journalism partners, and the Local Media Association. In the first six months, the newsrooms have produced more than 150 localized climate reports, collaborated on joint reporting projects, documented the social justice aspects of climate change, and implemented solutions reporting to focus on responses to climate change.
DML’s technology platform is the key distribution tool used by partners to easily share content across publisher websites. Still in its early stages, in July the collaborative collections had 675k viewable impressions and over 15k content views across 8 publisher sites. The collaborative has partnered with DML to produce five embeddable regionally focused collections covering the Great Lakes, East/Southeast, Gulf, Southwest, and West regions, in addition to national collections.
View our Covering Climate collections. To embed on your own site sign up for our Marketplace platform.
The Meta Branded Content Project is a project of the Local Media Association focused on training, tools, and sales support that increases the capacity of local publishers to generate branded content revenue.
Through a close partnership DML produces no-cost and low-cost custom content series for Meta Branded Content Project publishers. This partnership has driven more than $5M in trailing 12 month revenue to participating publishers.
"With over $393,000 in revenue, the Meta Branded Content Project has not only been a lifeline for our business during the pandemic, but it has also become a revenue stream that we fully expect to be an integral part of our business model moving forward"
— Chris Bennett, Editor and Publisher,The Seattle Medium
The Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk is a collaboration between 10 partner news organizations and seven additional expert reporters and advisors, coming together to cover issues related to agriculture and water as they become more pressing due to climate change.
DML is partnering with the collaborative to power content sharing between participating publishers. The project is still in early stages.