Photo by Monumental Arts.

Kathy Merritt to receive inaugural ‘Keystone Collaborator’ award at 2026 Collaborative Journalism Summit

I am absolutely thrilled to share that the Center for Cooperative Media at Montclair State University will honor **Kathy Merritt** with the inaugural Keystone Collaborator award at the 2026 Collaborative Journalism Summit on May 14–15 in Philadelphia.

The award, which will be given annually, recognizes an individual whose contributions to collaborative journalism have made a lasting impact on the field.

Merritt, who was most recently executive vice president and chief operating officer at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, spearheaded CPB’s investments in collaborative journalism beginning in 2009, when the CPB board determined that public media should do more to address the decline of local news.

Over the following 15 years, CPB provided more than $50 million to nearly 50 collaborations, connecting over 150 public media stations in nearly every state. CPB’s investments in collaborative journalism remain the largest to date of any organization in the United States.

This is significant because collaborative journalism has exploded over the last 20 years in the United States. The role of news outlets in our society has changed amid massive disruption and innovation in the way people communicate, and journalists today clearly see the value of working together.

Our Center has led the charge to study this shift over the last 10 years, and we recognized that there wasn’t enough celebration of the trailblazers, like Kathy, who have made this possible. That’s why we decided to start honoring an individual annually with the Keystone Collaborator award.

The Center selected Merritt for the inaugural award because of her leadership in bringing more collaboration to public media stations and their newsrooms. The CPB-funded collaborations employed local reporters and editors, enabling station newsrooms to produce more regional beat reporting and ambitious journalism projects than they could achieve alone.

Several have become fixtures in their regions — Harvest Public Media, one of the original five groups funded in 2009, remains a strong journalism presence and has expanded to additional states. Others include the Mountain West News Bureau, Gulf States Newsroom, The Texas Newsroom, and the New England News Collaborative.

The work produced through these collaborations has ranged widely: a documentary on dam removal in the Pacific Northwest from the Earthfix collaborative, an investigation into outrageous utility bills from the Gulf States Newsroom, and a 900-mile bike ride by a reporter listening to voters ahead of the 2020 election from the Mountain West News Bureau. Jeff Young, editor of the Ohio Valley ReSource, published a book, “Appalachian Fall,” based on reporting from his collaboration.

Beyond content, the collaborations have served as incubators for talent, with reporters and editors going on to leadership positions across the industry.

“No one has done more to champion and advance collaborative journalism in public media than Kathy Merritt,” said Joy Lin, who worked under Merritt at CPB as Vice President of Journalism.

Merritt devoted her career to public media, starting in 1983 as a local reporter at WFAE in Charlotte, N.C., where she became news director. She later moved to Washington, D.C., where she oversaw news operations at WAMU.

At CPB, she managed the Public Radio Talent Quest, which brought Al Letson and Glynn Washington to public media. She led multiple reviews of CPB’s Community Service Grant Program, which provided hundreds of millions of dollars annually to public media stations, and led the process in 2025 that launched Public Media Infrastructure, an organization dedicated to providing innovative distribution technology to public media.

Prior to her time at CPB, Merritt served as vice president for content strategy and development at Public Radio International. She is a past president of the Public Radio News Directors, Inc. (now the Public Media Journalists Association) and has received the Society of Professional Journalists’ National Award for Public Service in Broadcasting and the New York Festivals’ Gold Medal for Best News Magazine.

The 2026 Collaborative Journalism Summit takes place May 14–15 in Philadelphia. For more information and to register, visit summit.collaborativejournalism.org.

Stefanie Murray is the director of the Center for Cooperative Media at Montclair State University. Contact her at murrayst@montclair.edu.

About the Center for Cooperative Media: The Center is a primarily grant-funded program of the College of Communication and Media at *Montclair State University. Its mission is to grow and strengthen local journalism and support an informed society in New Jersey and beyond. The Center is supported with funding from Montclair State University, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Democracy Fund, the New Jersey Civic Information Consortium, Rita Allen Foundation, [Inasmuch Foundation](https://inasmuchfoundation.org/), Google News Initiative, and John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. For more information, visit centerforcooperativemedia.org.*