Largo Project Case Study

Project Argo was a project at NPR, funded by the Knight Foundation and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, to build topic-based verticals at member stations around the country. Those 12 beat blogs — on immigration in California, higher education in Minnesota, oceans and climate in Boston — were built on a set of WordPress-based tools built under the Argo banner.

Argo’s funding ended after two years (most of the blogs live on), but what lived on technologically speaking were those tools — themes, plugins, and lessons. The code lives on GitHub, but as many open source projects have discovered, the fact that code exists in the open is no guarantee that it will ever be used.

Enter Largo, which (loosely) stands for “longform Argo.” Largo was begun by INN in hopes of repurposing what Argo built for iterative blogging for a more traditional news site. Adam Schweigert, INN’s director of technology, was the lead developer on the Largo Project — or as he put it, the man in charge of asking the question, “What should nonprofit investigative news organizations look like on the web?” Most of INN’s members are small shops without much in the way of either tech capacity or excess budget.