witf teams with other PA public media stations to report on cities

• By Tom Downing/NPR

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) today announced that it has awarded a $1.5 million grant for the creation of a new multimedia local journalism center (LJC), Keystone Crossroads. The new LJC will be a collaboration of Pennsylvania public media stations including witf in Harrisburg.

The Keystone Crossroads LJC is led by WHYY in Philadelphia. witf will be a station partner along with Pittsburgh’s WQED and WESA FM, and WPSU in Centre County. The LJC will focus on the challenges the cities are facing, including a shrinking tax base and crumbling infrastructure, and enormous budget deficits. By combining smart storytelling with energetic civic engagement, Keystone Crossroads will help Pennsylvanians see the challenges of their cities more clearly, understand how they are related , and create a forum for potential solutions at both the local and state levels.

Many of the lessons witf and WHYY learned from their previous partnership on StateImpact Pennsylvania will be applied to the Keystone Crossroads project, by taking a multimedia approach with an aim to sustain a connected, contextualized, statewide reporting network on urban challenges.

Keystone Crossroads will look at specific public policies and explain how they impact the lives of Pennsylvanians. witf will work with its LJC partners to provide the highest quality of coverage through this unique journalistic collaboration to cover the major issues facing PA cities and discovering the ties that bind them.

witf has a long history of receiving national recognition and awards for local reporting on issues impacting the region on topics ranging from illegal immigration to mentoring programs and from personal and scientific views on cancer to covering the commonwealth’s energy economy with an emphasis on natural gas drilling in the Marcellus Shale formation.

“witf is thrilled to be a part of a team of journalists dedicated to helping people across the Commonwealth have a better understanding of their neighbors and the communities they call home,” said Tim Lambert, witf Multimedia News Director.

“Local Journalism Centers are really centers of collaboration comprising public media stations working together to report on local stories with significant impact,” said Pat Harrison, president and CEO of CPB. “This kind of focused collaboration ensures in depth reporting on issues of importance and concern to Pennsylvanians and of interest to all Americans.”

In addition to Keystone Crossroads, CPB funds six other LJCs across the country, including: EarthFix based in the Northwest; Fronteras in the Southwest; Harvest in the Midwest; Innovation Trail in upstate New York, the Southern Education Desk in the South, and most recently the Energy LJC in the Rocky mountains.