NPR promised to launch its $3 million local journalism effort Project Argo this summer and it’s making the deadline with days to spare. The Argo Network goes live officially today: twelve sites hosted by 14 stations, each zeroing in on a topic of specific interest to that community relevance—local music in Philly, education and technology in the Bay Area, climate change on Cape Cod, New York state politics, the military in San Diego. Now another clock starts ticking: the pilot project is funded only through fiscal year 2011.

NPR wants to show that with the right resources, stations can create beats of value to the community and in turn increase their own audience and value by using the internet as a platform for original content. Those resources include the funding to hire dedicated reporter-bloggers who come at the topic from an internet-first, not radio-first direction and the technology to support the sites. Put another way, it’s about helping members find a digital strategy beyond having a companion website for a radio station.

Stations may not be able to afford a team of reporters dedicated to a topic but can support one beat that is tightly focused, said Project Director Joel Sucherman. “Our mission is in proving out the theory. In order to gain traffic we feel there has to be a certain dedication to that site.” The stations selected to take part in the first Argo wave agreed to mainstream their new hires, not to carve out space away from the action. That’s not just to keep the blogger from being isolated; it’s to give the stations a chance to learn from how the blogger approaches writing and news.

At first glance, the small NPR logo tucked in the top right hand corner of new Philly music blog The Key might just be a reminder that parent station WXPN is an affiliate. But the logo with the words “Argo Network” is a subtle badge connecting the new site with the 11 other sites at NPR stations across the country, one of the few outward signs for most users that the network launching today even exists. No front-page mention of the role NPR had in launching The Key or the $3 million from the Knight Foundation and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Much of what connects the Argo Network is below the surface—for now.

Go deeper to an article page and an NPR Network module appears on the lower right rail with links to stories across the network. The interlinking I envisioned when I first heard about Project Argo isn’t there, though. Each site has its own taxonomy; there isn’t a shared tagging system that automatically links topics or threads. It’s more of a federation then a shared knowledge base. That’s because the real emphasis now is on the sites, not the network. “The thing we concentrated on most was making the site work for the audience for that site,” explains Matt Thompson, Argo editorial product manager.  “We imagined natural points of overlap but each site’s taxonomy is geared to its audience.”

Unlike the core station sites, which run on a variety of platforms, the Argo sites all use Word Press because of the familiarity and ease for bloggers, with a structure that let’s each one design its own look. They hang off of station domains but their server is in the Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN) cloud, not with each station.  Says Sucherman, “You’ll be able to recognize them as being part of a broader NPR effort even while they have distinctive identity.”

Tools being produced by the Argo team include a way to use Twitter to bubble up shared links instead of a litany of RTs or off-topic tweets. Each blogger builds a tightly focused group of people they follow on Twitter; the script returns the links that are repeated the most, not the tweets, to create what Sucherman calls a much better list of related content. The bloggers have full control and can pull links or add their own. They’ve also integrated the sites with Delicious so they can bookmark links and use tags that make relevant links show up around the site.

“The Argo team is dedicated to adding new features, functionality—we’re maybe about 33 percent to where we want to go,” says Sucherman. “We’ll be continuing to build this out for the next year and a half.” Eventually, whatever they develop will be released publicly as part of the Knight Foundation requirements. “One of the important pieces of what we are charged with doing is building site technology that can be used by anybody whether or not you’re part of public media.” But that doesn’t mean it has to be contemporaneous. “We won’t be making everything openly available until next year for people in public media and probably sometime in 2012 open to the wider world.”

At the same time, NPR is trying to create a template that will work for any station and will scale. The grant allows for raising more money or adding member stations that don’t need funding and Kinsey Wilson, SVP and GM of NPR Digital Media, says either might happen. “We may raise additional money to support bloggers in other communities,”  “Even if we don’t, there’s nothing to prevent stations from coming to us. It definitely is designed for scale—and I think you will see that happen in the next couple of months. We’re not prepared to say at this point exactly where and how.”

Argo in context:Starting small was an important choice. Wilson, who coined the name “Argo” with Jason and the Argonauts in mind, put in context with other efforts under way at NPR. “It’s important as you look at Argo to put in context with the variety of things that we’ve spun off in the last couple of years and how we’re trying to knit them together. The strategy was to try to get a variety of initiatives launched simultaneously that we could gradually draw together into a more coherent strategy over time rather than investing all of our energy and effort in a single huge project that would move like the glaciers.”

Argo’s role was designed to ramp up fast, moving from staff hires to launch in nine months—and, says Wilson, they delivered on time, in budget with promising templates for an approach to very focused journalism at the local level that can be replicated across local markets. “As a prototyping exercise, it’s accomplished exactly what we wanted to do.” The network possibilities across NPR are the second part. That will take more sites to work and more than Argo, says Wilson.

Apart from Project Argo, NPR is working with stations to put local content in the NPR API and extract content from the API. It’s also remaking Public Interactive, the Boston-based software solutions company it acquired, from a hosted software group to one that provides editorial and audience solutions with a focus on building audience. NPR designers and developers are working on an approach to local news coverage geared to medium-sized stations, rather than the larger stations taking part in Project Argo, including an enterprise solution. The goal is to migrate the 170 clients over to the new Drupal 7 platform by the end FY11.

The Public Media Platform initiative with NPR, PBS, American Public Media, Public Radio International (PRI), and the Public Radio Exchange, also is aimed at building a common digital platform. The efforts vary but Wilson says they’re aimed at a common goal: building the journalistic capacity of local stations in their markets and forging a local-national news network.

—Sustainability: NPR is leading on the design, technology and editorial fronts for Project Argo but how about sustainability? NPR’s rep firm National Public Media is looking at ways they can make an existing remnant network more extensive, make higher CPMS, do more at qualifying audience. The development group is exploring joint fundraising for major gifts with member stations. Wilson: “Projects like this are in many ways instrumental to building the kind of case you need to appeal to a donor who wants to have both a national and local impact.” He thinks Argo shows potential donors, especially those worried about the loss of news gathering in their communities, what can be accomplished.

—A “natural advantage” over Patch: Connecting the Argo sites to the community “is a huge part of the mission,” says Wilson. “The goal that we have set for them is to really be the first stop for anybody who is serious about staying abreast of a particular topic. That means helping people be aware of, alert to and understand what else is being written by others in that space.” That includes partnering where appropriate.

Wilson raised the possibility of comparison with AOL’s massive investment in local journalism through Patch. “You could line up what Patch is doing with what we’re doing and the broader vision behind it is probably not profoundly different.” True, NPR is working with established organizations with deep roots in the community but “what they’re doing and we’re doing are related approaches to the same audience problem. They’re just doing it with $100 million.”

Despite the funding tilt, Wilson argues that NPR has an advantage when it comes to sustainability over sites that are dependent on ad revenue: “We have demonstrated over 40 years that we can put together a sustainable business model that combines corporate underwriting, grants and gifts and individual donation. We believe we have proved that over time that has legs in the digital space. If borne out, not only do we not have to make the added margin the Patch sites have to make, we’re not as singly dependent on advertising revenue or corporate underwriting as they are and I think that’s a huge advantage. It remains to be seen whether there’s enough ad revenue out there to support serious news sites.”

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