The nonprofit news organization ProPublica announced a new initiative on Wednesday to provide funding for local news outlets to pursue investigative projects focused on state government.

ProPublica’s initiative, which is being financed by an undisclosed donor, is intended to “try to help fill that gap,” Richard Tofel, the president of ProPublica, said in a telephone interview.

“Over the last 13 years the business results of almost every journalism organization has continued to deteriorate and that’s especially acute at the local level,” he said. “This project, generally, is a response to that.”

With print advertising continuing to collapse, many local news organizations have seen their newsrooms emptied. As more readers have moved online, many newspapers have cut back on how often they are published. Just two weeks ago, the owner of The Daily News, a stalwart New York tabloid, laid off half the newsroom.

Between 2003 and 2014, there was a 35 percent decline in the number of reporters who cover statehouses, according to a Pew Research Center study — and that trend has only continued.

For its initiative, ProPublica said it would choose seven local news organizations and that the work would begin early next year. Editors for the organizations can contact ProPublica and explain the investigative project it intends to pursue, along with the name of a reporter who would lead the project. ProPublica said it would cover the salary of the reporter and provide an “allowance” for benefits for one year.

The project is bankrolled for the next two years, and Tofel said it is likely a new set of projects and news organizations will be selected for 2020. National news organizations like The New York Times are not eligible to benefit from the grant.

This is an expansion of a similar project that ProPublica started last year to help aid local reporting.

That initiative, which was paid for by another unnamed donor and is also financed through 2020, includes all facets of local reporting, not just state government. Among the reporting that funding helped produce was a series by The Southern Illinoisan that investigated a public housing scandal in Cairo, Illinois, and another on worker safety at nuclear facilities for The Santa Fe New Mexican.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

John Koblin © 2018 The New York Times