A statewide newsroom pivoted from outdoors creators to an immigration investigator and came away with two co-reported investigations and a reusable collaboration agreement other newsrooms can adopt.
A 29-year-old YouTuber now matches France’s biggest network in audience trust. TF1 is partnering with him — and creators like him — to lend the newsroom some of that credibility. Early results suggest some of these alliances aren’t working
A newsroom with no dedicated social staff used the cohort to assemble a cross-team working group and plan its first original creator collaboration, a series on the city's beloved sausage culture.
A statewide newsroom pivoted from outdoors creators to an immigration investigator and came away with two co-reported investigations and a reusable collaboration agreement other newsrooms can adopt.
Florida ranks last among all 50 states in news outlets per capita, making it the worst news desert in the country, and it is also home to the third-largest immigrant population in the nation, behind only California and Texas. As The Florida Trib grew from a Jacksonville newsroom, founded in 2021 as The Tributary, into a statewide operation, the team saw a creator collaboration as a way to reach those audiences where they already spend their time, while bringing in sourcing and subject-matter depth the newsroom couldn’t staff internally.
The newsroom came into the cohort knowing very little about working with creators, and its original plan looked quite different from where it landed. The idea was to partner with outdoors-focused creators to share environmental coverage. After the first session and a well-timed email, the team found itself with a chance to meet an entirely different need, and it pivoted to a co-creation partnership with an investigative journalist and creator focused on immigration. The shift was part serendipity and part the cohort doing its job, as what the team was learning collided with an opportunity that surfaced through its Florida network.
The timing mattered. Over the past year, Florida has seen one of the largest expansions of local immigration enforcement anywhere in the country, as sheriffs’ offices and police departments signed 287(g) agreements that let local officers question, detain, and process people for ICE. Local coverage of immigration in the state is thin, and much of what exists sits behind paywalls, out of reach for the Hispanic and lower-income residents most affected. According to the Trib’s own polling and national research, those residents are more likely to get their news from social media than from paid sources. On top of all that, the newsroom’s immigration reporting position was vacant.
Through its network of current and former Florida journalists, the Trib was connected with Monique O. Madan, founder of Two Can Be True. Madan is a longtime print journalist whose work has appeared in the Miami Herald, USA TODAY, The Markup, The Guardian, and The New York Times, and Two Can Be True is where her investigative reporting, narrative writing, and lived experience come together. She reports across her newsletter, TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube, reaching audiences directly. She also had history with the newsroom: at the Miami Herald she had worked with Casey Frank, now the Trib’s special projects editor, and that existing trust gave the partnership a strong footing from day one.
The team saw three reasons she was the right fit. The first was access, since her sourcing and expertise on immigration enforcement went far beyond anything the newsroom could build from a standing start. The second was reach, because her platform-native storytelling could carry accountability reporting to social-first audiences, including Floridians who rarely encounter the Trib’s site. The third was shared values. Madan works as a journalist first, which meant the newsroom could hold the work to its existing professional, nonpartisan standards, and that framing shaped every decision that followed.
Things came together quickly, with support from the cohort complemented by a Lenfest Institute pilot grant focused on experimenting with creator collaboration in investigative reporting. Deirdre Conner, publisher and CEO, led the project and served as Madan’s primary contact for shaping the partnership and handling the contract. Casey Frank edited the series and ran fact-checking and editorial review, executive editor Nate Monroe provided oversight, and Madan led the reporting.
The team built the collaboration as true co-creation from the start. Madan, Conner, and Frank were in frequent, sometimes daily, contact as they shaped stories, framing, and distribution, and a shared Google Drive folder held notes, decisions, edits, and co-written social copy so the division of editorial authority stayed clear. The Trib could request changes for accuracy, context, fairness, and legal risk, while voice, format, and platform-native style stayed in Madan’s hands.
Because immigration sourcing is so sensitive, the newsroom and Madan settled the standards for anonymous and background sources with the series editor in advance, and Madan reviewed final copy, headlines, and visuals to catch anything that might compromise a source. That protocol was put to the test quickly. The second story rested on two sources with direct knowledge of a detention facility’s operations, and the newsroom and Madan jointly decided not to name them because they weren’t authorized to speak and feared retaliation.
The team also treated the partnership itself as a deliverable. Alongside the reporting, it co-developed a plain-language Creator Collaboration Agreement that other newsrooms and creators can adopt, drawing on the cohort’s materials and training (including its creator-partnership worksheet), the Trib’s existing contractor agreement, and the FIRE model freelance contract. Disclosure was built in from the beginning, with a spoken line at the top of each video, a caption on social posts, and a standing note on the page about the co-reported partnership.
Finally, the newsroom confirmed that the reporting would be covered under its existing media liability policy, which it is. Most creators don’t carry that kind of insurance, so the team sees this step as essential for any newsroom doing government accountability or investigative work alongside a creator.
The partnership produced two co-reported investigations during the pilot.
The first, published in early May 2026 under the headline “A secret ICE directive is testing one of Florida’s strongest traditions: open government,” revealed a directive instructing local agencies in the 287(g) program not to release records tied to local immigration arrests, including numbers, statistics, and calculations, without ICE approval. That put the directive in direct conflict with Florida’s strong public-records law. The story ran on The Florida Trib and in Two Can Be True, paired with vertical video and an embedded searchable database of Florida agencies with ICE agreements from partners CalMatters and The Markup.
The second, published June 25, was “Florida officials said ‘Alligator Alcatraz’ was shutting down. Inside, the facility’s fate was far less clear.” Drawing on inside sources, it showed that even as officials publicly announced the Everglades detention center’s closure, they were privately weighing whether to keep it available as a short-term federal deportation staging site. It tied directly back to the first story, because at the closing press conference officials touted Florida’s 287(g) numbers without releasing the agency-by-agency data behind them, the very records local agencies had been told not to disclose.
Measured against the goals the team set at the outset, the signals were encouraging:
The team is candid that this model is more time-consuming and more expensive than its usual work with freelancers or peer organizations. It also works. A structured, well-documented collaboration between an institutional newsroom and an independent creator produced original accountability journalism, including a sensitive, source-driven investigation, carried it to new audiences, and left behind both a precedent and a template the field can pick up.
Confirm your insurance. Newsrooms should make sure the reporting is covered under their media liability policy, and creators should either see that coverage spelled out in their contract or plan to provide their own. This was easy for the Trib, but it won’t be for every organization.
Set editorial expectations early, especially on a sensitive beat. The reporting workflow felt fairly familiar here. Madan handled reporting and writing and worked with Trib editors much as any reporter or freelancer would, and their prior relationship and shared standards helped build trust on both sides. Even so, the team came away convinced that any investigative co-creation needs clear expectations about editorial standards and an agreement that both parties sign off on the published copy. Anonymous-source standards, proof and headline review, and corrections all benefit from upfront clarity.
Decide your republishing posture in advance. The Trib has an open republishing policy with guidelines, while Two Can Be True is more selective. The two landed on an approach where organizations interested in republishing reach out first, so Madan and Trib staff can jointly approve each request.
Pay and treat the creator as a journalist. Settling the details up front saves a lot of scrambling later, from credit lines and republishing parameters to pay, ownership of notes and recordings, and insurance.
Know your model. The cohort’s four models of creator collaboration were tremendously helpful for the team in figuring out next steps and setting the partnership up to succeed.
The Trib plans to keep working with creators and is now set up to do it repeatably. For the newsroom, the most valuable outcome is a reusable agreement for co-creating journalism and a documented process it can run again without rebuilding from scratch. The goal is to partner with creators the way the Trib already partners with other newsrooms, along a spectrum that runs from republishing and featuring work all the way to deep co-creation on projects.
Looking ahead, the team hopes to experiment with other models of creator partnership and extend the approach to other beats and creators wherever it sees the same pattern of under-reached, civically hungry audiences. It would also like to keep building with Madan when the stories warrant it.
Two things would help the newsroom keep going. The first is short-term funding, since this kind of collaboration takes more staff time and partner compensation than a traditional freelance or staff-written story, which is especially hard on a small newsroom. The second is shared learning with other newsrooms about what deeper success metrics for these partnerships should look like, along with advice on measuring trust and reach more holistically.
A 29-year-old YouTuber now matches France’s biggest network in audience trust. TF1 is partnering with him — and creators like him — to lend the newsroom some of that credibility. Early results suggest some of these alliances aren’t working
A newsroom with no dedicated social staff used the cohort to assemble a cross-team working group and plan its first original creator collaboration, a series on the city's beloved sausage culture.
For a nonpartisan newsroom covering politics, the toughest part of a creator partnership came before any outreach: deciding which creators it could work with without putting its credibility at risk.
How a statewide newsroom known for long-form reporting turned to two Montana creators to build brand awareness in a market it was working to enter.
