NPR received a $5.5 million grant from Eric and Wendy Schmidt to fund two regional newsrooms and a visual journalism pilot. The three-year grant was announced in a Wednesday press release.
The funding was intended to expand the number of NPR regional newsrooms to seven by the end of the year with the addition of an Appalachia newsroom. The grant also supports the Mountain West News Bureau, an existing collaboration involving 14 stations in Colorado, Idaho, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming. This collaboration was set to become one of NPR's regional newsrooms within its Collaborative Journalism Network.
NPR also planned to work with the New England News Collaborative, a nine-station public radio regional journalism collaborative. This partnership was scheduled to begin a pilot project to increase short-form video news coverage. According to the release, the pilot was designed to provide training and mentorship to build visual storytelling capacity and knowledge of best practices for digital platforms.
Eric Schmidt is a former CEO of Google. The philanthropists had previously donated $4.7 million to NPR to support two other regional newsrooms. Wendy Schmidt, co-founder and president of the Schmidt Family Foundation, stated in the release that the investment aimed to strengthen democracy and uplift voices that deserve to be heard.
