Loved and Lost is a new statewide media collaboration with a goal of naming and celebrating the life of every New Jersey resident who has died of COVID-19.
It was originally a project of NorthJersey.com and is now being coordinated by the Center for Cooperative Media at Montclair State University.
We’re looking to recruit news partners and freelancers from every corner of the state to produce stories about people who have died in their communities.
By working together, we will be able to tell more stories of those we have lost, and will be able to tell more authentic stories. News partners will have access to our database and will be able to volunteer or be assigned stories of people who passed in their news coverage area.
OUR PARTNERS:
To be eligible to join, news partners must agree to the following:
- Participate in an initial training/onboarding session.
- Agree to publicly promote the project, including the form for submission of COVID victim names.
- Share any COVID victim profiles completed prior to joining the project.
- Add COVID victim names identified to the master list.
- Agree to either volunteer for, or be assigned, profiles that fall in their coverage area, as you are able to write them. (We don’t want to overwhelm you!)
- Agree to allow the Center’s project coordinator to moderate cases where multiple news organizations want to do the same profile. In cases of very high-profile victims, we may need to allow competitive stories. But in most cases, in an effort to reduce harm to families, care should be taken to do one profile per person.
- Add the shared branding language to all stories.
- Submit stories for editing if/as needed.
- Allow for republication by other media partners of all profiles produced, with full attribution using the approved shared language, while maintaining the full copyright of the original work.
In return, the Loved and Lost project team will:
- Maintain the database with all the COVID victim’s named and allow it to be accessible to all media partners.
- Maintain a central Google Drive folder with all relevant materials.
- Assign and keep track of which news organizations and which journalists are doing which profiles.
- Provide editing feedback when requested on profiles.
- Maintain the master website which will link to all profiles.
- Seek to provide funding to support this work, especially for small and independent news organizations and freelancers.
- Serve as the main liaison between all partners.
We know there will be more potential stories than most news outlets can handle. We are actively fundraising now in the hopes of providing funding in the future to offset your reporting costs and to hire freelancers.
Use the form linked below to apply to join the project as a news partner. For more information about the project, contact the Center at [email protected].