Facebook Inc. announced today that it has launched the Facebook Journalism Project: Local News Subscriptions Accelerator, a $3 million pilot program that will teach local news outlets how to grow their digital subscriber numbers.

Campbell Brown, Facebook’s head of news partnerships, said in a statement that the accelerator will help metro news organizations develop strategies for their digital subscriptions, which Brown said are “critical to the long-term sustainability of their business.”

Participants in the program will follow a training curriculum created by Tim Griggs, a media consultant who previously served at the executive director of cross-platform monetization at the New York Times. The curriculum involves weekly training sessions that cover “a broad array of digital subscriptions marketing activities,” which includes both Facebook and other social media platforms.

The publishers will also meet once a month to receive in-person coaching from digital subscription experts, who will then help the publishers design strategies that meet their specific business needs. Brown said that the accelerator will offer grant funding to help participants “implement solutions that help elevate their subscription business.”

Several major regional news outlets are participating in Facebook’s pilot program, including The Boston Globe, The Chicago Tribune, The Dallas Morning News and others. The program is currently limited to about a dozen U.S. outlets, but Brown said that Facebook is working to share the group’s strategies and case studies with the Local Media Consortium, Local Media Association and the News Media Alliance.

To do this, Facebook has partnered with The Lenfest Institute, a nonprofit organization whose mission is “to develop and support sustainable business models for great local journalism.”

“The Accelerator has been designed by publishers for publishers,” said Jim Friedlich, executive director of The Lenfest Institute. “The workshop and grant program addresses one of our most significant opportunities for new revenue to fund local journalism.”

Christian Hendricks, president of the Local Media Consortium, added that Facebook’s accelerator is “a smart way to tackle what’s been a vexing problem for most publishers.”

The Local News Subscriptions Accelerator is another attempt by Facebook to repair its strained relationship with smaller publishers, many of which have been worried that the changes to Facebook News Feed would hurt their reach on the social network. Facebook attempted to address this problem in January by tweaking News Feed to prioritize posts from local news outlets for users in their coverage areas.

Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg said at the time that users “consistently tell us they want to see more local news on Facebook,” adding that local news “helps build community — both on and offline.”

Photo: Facebook