KALW's The Informant is part of Argo

Today, NPR formally launched the Argo Project, a network of topical, locally focused, news sites hosted by 12 member stations. Two of the dozen are located in the Bay Area — the only cluster of Argo sites outside of the Boston area, which has one in that city and one located in Cape Cod.

The San Francisco-based NPR affiliate KALW's blog, The Informant, will take on criminal justice issues, while SF's KQED blog, MindShift, will look at technology's role in education.

Other blogs will include one on the military from San Diego's KPBS, one on immigration from LA-based Southern California Public Radio and higher education from a Minnesota station.

As befitting sites hosted by two very different media organizations, the Bay Area's Argo sites don't appear to have much overlap on the surface. "Our focus is and has been on making these sites offer the most value for the community. That's why each site has a different look and feel," said Matt Thompson, NPR's editorial project manager, who has been working on the Argo network since February of this year.

Funded by a $3 million grant from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, Argo aims to integrate the broad reach of mainstream news with community-focused, in-depth coverage enabled by smaller news sites. Thompson said ideally this would be a pilot program, with more network sites to be launched in the future.

"One of the many goals is to have a strong collaboration between NPR and member stations and develop a strong digital presence," Thompson said. "Another thing is to learn things … to apply toward expanding and replicating this model."

The topics were chosen, Thompson said, both by NPR and the participating stations, and designed to have both local and national resonance.

While today is the formal announcement, some sites have been live for a while. KALW's The Informant blog has been reporting on "cops, courts and communities in the Bay Area" for about three weeks now. According to Rina Palta, who runs the blog with Ali Winston, the topic of the blog was chosen based on the lack of in-depth coverage of crime in the Bay Area. "There's a lot of daily coverage of criminal justice issues, mostly blockbuster kind of stuff," says Palta, "but there's no one looking at the bigger picture and connecting the dots."

Palta, who was a KALW reporter before she became a full-time Argo-blogger, has been meeting with community organizations in an effort to find guest contributors. "I'm trying to find community organizations that aren't as media savvy and that don't have a way get their stuff out there," says Palta, who hopes that the site will soon have an active comment section.

The Informant, its posts ranging from audio stories, police blotters to investigative reports, reaches across journalistic genres. But the unifying genre is "more analysis and less breaking news," says Palta. "I think there's a hunger for analysis, especially in terms of crime reporting."

But Palta is still gauging the public's appetite in terms of stories. While the site is intended for a general audience, the current audience is mostly members of the criminal justice community. Palta hopes that the audience will expand to a more general audience soon — that is, after all, the intent of the Argo Project: to link local, niche-oriented news with bigger ideas.

Correction: A previous version of this article stated that the public radio station KALW is based in Oakland. It is located in San Francisco.