Seeking “innovative,” “stable,” and “interested”: How The Markup and CalMatters matched up | Nieman Journalism Lab
The nonprofit newsrooms CalMatters and The Markup announced last week that they were joining forces. CalMatters, founded in 2015, is an established statewide newsroom, while the 4-year-old Markup focuses on technology and stories that are national — even global — in scope.
Nabiha Syed, chief executive officer of The Markup, said the idea of a merger or acquisition had been on her mind “in a general way” for some time before talks began with CalMatters.
RELATED ARTICLE“Big tech is watching you. Who’s watching big tech?” The Markup is finally ready for liftoffSarah ScireFebruary 25, 2020“We live in this industry. We all know the reality. We know that we have to be efficient and really effective with our resources,” Syed said. “Mergers [can make] good business sense if the partners are a good fit. And that’s always the big question: ‘Are the partners a good fit?'”
One specific catalyst was seeing Markup stories resonate locally — especially in California, home to many of the tech companies that The Markup covers. (Syed hailed editor-in-chief Sisi Wei‘s “visionary leadership” in finding partners for The Markup’s stories and publishing “story recipes” that help local outlets find disparities in internet offers by neighborhood, investigate censorship in schools, and see if their city is using flawed homeless vulnerability scoring systems.) The other was finding the right match.
