NPR Launches New Online Local Journalism Venture With CPB and Knight Foundation Funding – Knight Foundation
Journalism

NPR Launches New Online Local Journalism Venture With CPB and Knight Foundation Funding

Above: Four pilot sites of 12 launched with NPR’s Project Argo.

Washington, DC, (October 2, 2009) – NPR will launch a new journalism project to develop in-depth, local coverage on topics critical to communities and the nation, in a new effort funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the groups announced today.

The new funding – $2 million from CPB and $1 million from Knight Foundation – provides a pilot group of NPR stations with the resources to expand original reporting, and to curate, distribute and share online content about high-interest, specialized subjects. It is the first time that CPB and Knight Foundation have jointly funded a project of this type.

The two-year pilot will help a dozen stations establish themselves as definitive sources of news on a topic selected by each one as most relevant to its community, such as city politics, the changing economy, healthcare, immigration or education. These online reports will help fill the growing gap in local news offerings.

“The opportunity here is two-fold. First, to beef up coverage of critical issues at the local level, and, second, to begin to establish an online network that can transform itself into a news powerhouse of unparalleled depth and quality,” said Vivian Schiller, NPR president and CEO. “We are grateful to CPB and Knight Foundation for partnering with us to realize this potential and we thank them for supporting our mission to create a more informed public.”

“Public Media has an opportunity and a responsibility, in an environment of rapid technological and social change, to ensure diverse publics get the trusted information they need on issues important to their lives.” said Patricia Harrison, president and CEO of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. “CPB and the CPB board led by our Chairman Ernie Wilson are committed to ensuring that this web-first, multi platform news approach will be among many innovative investments that CPB makes to strengthen local and network journalism.”

Alberto Ibargüen of Knight Foundation added: “The contraction of professional journalism poses a direct threat to our democracy as access to independent, in-depth, news and information is diminished.”

“As the country’s largest not-for-profit news organization and one that is gaining audience and innovating, NPR and its member stations are uniquely positioned to respond to the crisis in American journalism,” Ibarguen said.

The CPB and Knight Foundation grants will allow about a dozen NPR stations throughout the U.S. with established news operations to hire new journalist bloggers. Each will focus exclusively on reporting and aggregating news about a topic relevant to that city, based upon its geography and unique characteristics. Stations will feed their work into NPR’s content management system, where the entire group of participants will have easy access to each others’ work to inform, enrich and add context as they create and present their stories. This common content sharing infrastructure provides a solid platform to support stations’ online publishing needs and to expand the power of the network.

In addition, PBS’s The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer will share its embeddable video player with the pilot participants. The player makes it possible to access and present video content from NewsHour, Frontline, NOW, Washington Week, Bill Moyers Journal, Tavis Smiley and about a dozen local PBS stations. The NewsHour will also feature selected reporting from the participating stations on its Web site.

Several stations played an active role in developing this pilot concept, including NPR/PBS stations: Oregon Public Broadcasting (Portland), Northern California Public Broadcasting/KQED (San Francisco), WGBH (Boston) and KPBS (San Diego) – and radio stations: Southern California Public Radio/KPCC (Los Angeles), KALW, (San Francisco), KPLU (Seattle), WAMU (Washington D.C.), WXPN (Philadelphia), Wyoming Public Radio, Minnesota Public Radio, WNYC (New York), and WBUR (Boston).

While the stations that will co-create the pilots with NPR have not yet been selected, they will include a mix of radio/TV operations and public radio stations of various types across the country. The stations chosen will commit to covering a portion of the pilot cost and to sustaining the new staff upon conclusion of the grants. The search for a diverse and well-qualified pool of journalist bloggers will begin as soon as the stations are confirmed.

Knight Foundation has been a long time funder of NPR’s journalism initiatives, including a major grant to expand NPR journalists’ skills in online reporting, video and photography in order to transform NPR into a multimedia news service. CPB funds NPR through competitive grants – most recently funding comprehensive coverage of the economic crisis at the global, national and local levels.

About NPR

NPR is an award-winning, multimedia news organization and an influential force in American life. In collaboration with more than 880 independent public radio stations nationwide, NPR strives to create a more informed public – one challenged and invigorated by a deeper understanding and appreciation of events, ideas and cultures.

About CPB

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting is a private, nonprofit corporation created by Congress in 1967 and is the steward of the federal government’s investment in public broadcasting. It helps support the operations of more than 1,100 locally-owned and operated public television and radio stations nationwide and is the largest single source of funding for research, technology and program development for public radio, television and related online services. (www.cpb.org)

About the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation

The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation advances journalism in the digital age and invests in the vitality of communities where the Knight brothers owned newspapers. Knight Foundation focuses on projects that promote community engagement and lead to transformational change. For more, visit www.knightfoundation.org.

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Related Links

Some Argo Project Sites