The Corporation for Public Broadcasting has announced a major journalism initiative that will increase original local reporting in seven regions around the country. Media Minutes has the story this week.

The CPB is funding the creation of seven Local Journalism Centers that would combine the resources of participating public TV and radio stations to tackle important but under-reported regional news stories.

Patricia Harrison, President and CEO of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, says that the public media system is uniquely structured to increase regional reporting.

Harrison: Our mission is to take that 30,000-foot view of how public media, television and radio and now online, how are they meeting the need in this, in any changing environment. And it’s obvious that journalism is going through a big change, and we saw a need to fill – a need that was specifically fillable, given our mission and our commitment over the last 40 years to both education and journalism.

The Centers will be comprised of three to seven public media stations in specific geographic areas. They will hire teams of multimedia journalists and editors who will work with station news directors. The teams will decide on a single issue of concern for their region. Their reports will be distributed across radio, TV and the Web. Individual stations will also conduct community engagement programs.

The CPB will initially fund five local journalism centers in the coming months in the Southwest, the Plains states, upstate New York, the Upper Mid-West, and Central Florida. Two more will be added in the coming months – one in the South and one in the Northwest.

Harrison says that the centers – which will initially focus on issues like upstate New York’s agriculture economy, healthcare issues in Central Florida, and immigration in the Southwest – will bring diversity and depth to regional reporting that has been missing in news reporting. She describes the immigration reporting project:

Harrison: They’re going to hire a bilingual reporting team to look at what they’re calling, “The Changing America Desk,” and look at some of the issues, such as immigration and border issues that are impacting that region. But without having that bilingual, sort of extra added value, you could miss some really great interviews. We’re really going to have a 360-degree approach to this issue. So that ranges from Phoenix to San Diego, Nevada, New Mexico, Texas, Arizona. And while they have done stories on this issue – all of these stations – this really pumps it up.

The total CPB and station investment over two years is approximately $10.5 million, with an expectation that each Center will become self-sustaining by the end of the two-year funding period.

Listen to the rest of this week’s Media Minutes here.