The Lens is joining a coalition of online publishers in New Orleans to promote each other’s work, with the goal of offering readers a wider array of news and information.

The New Orleans Digital News Alliance brings together The Lens, My Spilt Milk, NOLA Defender and Uptown Messenger.

These initial members will highlight work of mutual interest, and further plans for cooperation are being developed.

The New Orleans media landscape is in flux, and the New Orleans Digital News Alliance strives to ensure that the city’s digital press provides deep, current and breaking coverage of the community in a way that is true to its unique culture.

This new coalition will promote readership of local news outlets regardless of medium, and it encourages community engagement in the journalistic process. The city needs more journalistic voices than ever, and this alliance will explore opportunities to create new media models as the field evolves.

This is the second cooperative effort involving The Lens announced today. WWNO-FM announced that it will work with The Lens and NolaVie.com to expand coverage on all three websites and as part of WWNO’s news-focused format, which launched today.

These collaborations expand on The Lens’ current partnerships and further our nonprofit mission to widely distribute our public-interest journalism that aims to educate and inform our audience.

See the full news release here.

Steve Beatty is the publisher and chief executive officer of The Lens. He worked as an editor for The Times-Picayune for 15 years, leaving New Orleans just before Katrina to take a position as an editor...