After leading a cohort of metropolitan newspapers through a subscriptions accelerator this year, Facebook is now kicking off its next round, focused this time on membership in nonprofit and digital-only local news organizations.

The membership accelerator, now one of three different threads in Facebook’s olive-branch programming for local news, started with an in-person gathering in Austin late last month and continues for three months. Facebook extended the subscriptions accelerator, piloted with 14 newsrooms beginning in February, throughout the rest of 2018 and is transitioning it to a retention focus in 2019.

The programming is led by former Texas Tribune publisher/New York Times digital strategy executive/now independent media consultant Tim Griggs (he spoke with us about the training earlier this year) and a group of industry coaches and experts including the Christian Science Monitor’s David Grant and Mother Jones’ Brian Hiatt. Participants receive grant funding, attend regular webinars, and gather two more times in person over the next three months.

The accelerators’ participants were selected by Facebook rather than via an external application process, with input from the Lenfest Institute, the Local Media Consortium, the Local Media Association, and the News Media Alliance for the subscription side; the Institute for Nonprofit News, Local Independent Online News (LION) Publishers, and the News Revenue Hub for the membership one.

Here’s the full list of the 17 membership accelerator participants; you can find much more about nearly all of them in the Nieman Lab archives:

• MinnPost, a regional Minnesota nonprofit newsroom founded in 2007 which reached sustainability as early as 2010 via memberships, advertising, and events
• PublicSource, a nonprofit newsroom launched in Pittsburgh in 2011 now with10 full-time employees supported primarily by local foundations
• Richland Source, a Mansfield, Ohio publication conceived by the CEO of a local printer and copier supplier in 2013, which has primarily relied on advertising revenue in the past
• VTDigger, Vermont’s eight-year-old, online-only nonprofit news organization with a staff rivaling the size of the state’s largest newspaper
• CALmatters, the three-year-old California state policy explainer
• The Rivard Report, a San Antonio independent journalism outlet that transitioned to nonprofit status in 2015
• Berkeleyside, the Bay Area local news site which raised $1 million from 355 readers in a direct public offering (also known as crowd-investing), asking followers to chip in with at least $1,000
• WhereBy.Us, the parent company behind a growing network of newsletters for the “curious locals” target audience, which has asked its followers to consider crowd-investing in the startup
• Spirited Media, serial digital news entrepreneur Jim Brady’s latest experiment, focused on building a nationwide digital local news chain (which pivoted to memberships after laying off folks last year)
• Patch — yes, Patch, which lives on past its much-hullabalooed troubles a few years back
• Bridge Magazine, part of the Center for Michigan, a self-described “think-and-do tank” based in Ann Arbor
• City Limits, a nonprofit investigative journalism outlet based in New York City and founded in 1976
• Wisconsin Watch, part of the nonprofit Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism, which was almost forced off campus by state legislators a few years ago
• KOSU, the public radio station of Oklahoma City, Oklahoma
• DPTV, Detroit’s public TV station
• WABE, Atlanta’s public broadcasting for radio and TV
• KUER, Utah’s NPR station

You can read more about the accelerator’s training here.