Ten of the 12 public radio stations participating in the NPR-led Argo Project intend to continue reporting on their specialized topics when the blogging pilot ends this month. “[F]or some stations, it’s been an eye-opening experience in how original, web-native publishing can expand audiences in ways that repurposed radio content might not on its own,” reports Andrew Phelps of Nieman Lab. “At four of the 12 stations, their Argo blog drew monthly audiences bigger than every other part of their news sites combined.” Blogs published by California stations KQED and KPBS were top performers in the Argo Network, and both intend to keep reporting next year.
The Argo Project launched in 2010 as a demonstration and proving ground for NPR’s strategy to help stations expand their digital reporting capacity. CPB and the Knight Foundation provided grants totaling $3 million for the two-year experiment.