CA Radio: NPR, Stations Launch Statewide Newsroom

Public radio stations across California are teaming up with NPR on a California regional newsroom to increase coverage of statewide issues and boost reporting from and for underserved regions across the state. Joanne Griffith, a widely respected and deeply experienced reporter and producer, was hired as the newsroom's first managing editor.

Led by KQED in San Francisco, the public radio collaboration includes KPBS, CapRadio, KPCC/LAist and KCRW as anchor stations and NPR as the statewide newsroom's national partner. Four of the five anchor stations already work together through the California Dream journalism collaboration, launched with funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting in 2017. Ultimately, the collaborative aims to include participation from all public radio stations in the state, especially those in "news deserts" or areas that lack robust local news coverage as small town newspapers have declined.

Joanne Griffith

Griffith comes to the job with trust and respect throughout the public media network, most recently serving as the assistant managing editor of digital for Marketplace.

Griffith will work out of the KPCC/LAist offices in Pasadena but will be leading daily collaboration and coordination between news outlets across California, including public media affiliates in Fresno, Chico, San Luis Obispo and beyond. Her initial focus will be on 2020 election coverage.

"As the media industry faces increasing economic and political pressures, working together collaboratively to deliver public interest journalism is more important than ever," said Holly Kernan, chief content officer at KQED and a key champion of this effort. "This collaborative effort will ensure California citizens have accurate, independent and important news from across the state, which can only improve our democracy."

The California news hub is the second such collaboration in the country, joining The Texas Newsroom, which launched last year and produces six live, statewide newscasts each weekday that draw content from public radio stations large and small across Texas.

NPR and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting have made significant investments in the national collaborative journalism initiative, which will help reshape the way public media stations engage their audiences. Both organizations have identified this collaboration as a prototype for the way stations throughout the country can share resources in order to produce more of the journalism their communities need and reach new audiences.