With Grant, NPR to Step Up State Government Reporting

National Public Radio has received a $1.8 million grant from the Open Society Foundations to begin a project called Impact of Government that is intended to add at least 100 journalists at NPR member radio stations in all 50 states over the next three years. The reporters, editors and analysts will cover state governments and how their actions affect people.

The project "creates capacity for local stations to hire reporters and to cover issues that matter that other places aren't doing," said Vivian Schiller, NPR's president and chief executive. "Everything that we're doing as relates to member stations comes down to two things: building local news capacity and making sure the content we create is available to all people across all platforms." Schiller said the journalists would not be part of typical statehouse coverage, but instead would work on enterprise journalism that looks at how state government decisions play out over years, and extend beyond a single state's borders. The program, one of a number of new public media reporting projects meant to counter some of the cutbacks in profit-making journalism, will begin with an eight-state pilot phase in March 2011. Eventually, NPR and local stations hope to raise about $17 million to expand the program, and $18 million to $19 million annually to sustain it, said Ron Schiller, president of the NPR Foundation and NPR's senior vice president for development.