Exactly one year ago, I hit publish on the very first piece that appeared on this Substack. It was a companion piece to a much longer one that published via Current the very same day, where I compiled all the station financial documentation I’d painstakingly gathered the previous two months and wrote about how much public media stations actually relied on federal funding.

As it turns out, my Current article drew a lot of attention, and I was thrilled - not even joking - when I logged into my account a few days later and saw 50 subscribers.

Since then, we’ve grown tremendously, not just in size but also in mission. Last week, we finally hit our GoFundMe goal of $30,000 to turn a somewhat spartan newsletter into a full-blown organization. If you contributed to that campaign, we’d like to thank you from the bottoms of our hearts; and if you didn’t, well, there’s still time to do so. Or, you can become a paid subscriber:

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Your support has actually been at work inside Semipublic since at least December. We’re not yet ready to talk about what we’re working on (hold on until summer!), but it’s quite significant.

In the meantime, I wanted to take a moment to review the impact we’ve had over the past 12 months.

“Here’s how much public media relies on federal funding, and what could happen next” - Current.org

Here’s how I always frame the origin of my articles on public media’s federal funding in Current, and really the origin of Semipublic itself: I got annoyed by the reporting and conversations happening around public media losing its federal funding because none of it was based on real data. What’s worse is that the data was easily-obtained through station financial disclosures.

All of that led me to, as I mentioned earlier, a months-long journey to find every single disclosure and import it (manually) into a spreadsheet.

This article took me forever to write and edit, especially after I received an anonymous copy of a confidential NPR report from 2011, and I’m pleased that it still gets comments to this day.

To date, this is Semipublic’s best-performing post (even beating out the Adopt A Station announcement). Nobody likes squeezing water from a rock, but there were certain analyses that I wanted to revisit and a few I wanted to add, especially in light of the now-unconstitutional executive order President Trump signed limiting federal funding to NPR and PBS the prior week. Semipublic’s insights from this post about specific at-risk stations, especially native and Alaskan stations, are still being used to this day by students and researchers.

“What defunding public media would mean for the West” - High Country News

If you haven’t read this feature yet, do yourself a favor and revisit it. It’s a gorgeous layout and Annie did an amazing job of using our research to zoom in on what was actually at stake for the Western stations in the article.. It’s also one of the first interviews we did as Semipublic.

I was surprised at how calm and quiet everything at Semipublic was when the rescissions bill was passed in Congress. I had been following it closely for a few months, and when it finally passed that night, I had time to write a post, chat with former NPR colleagues about it, and leisurely pack for the beach. It wasn’t until the next day that the weight of the situation fully hit us.

The story of Adopt A Station is that I came up with this idea with that same group of NPR colleagues I had been chatting with. In a very similar way to starting Semipublic, I just decided it was a good idea, so I built a website using Bolt and bought a domain name the very same day.

When I launched it the following day, a Saturday morning, I literally did it from my phone as we began a five-hour drive to the beach. It instantly went viral…to the chagrin of my wife, who I had to ask to keep driving so I could respond to all the comments and messages I was getting. I took more calls and interviews that week than I had ever done in my life.

Nine months later, Adopt A Station is still our most popular and best-known property ever. As often as I can, I tell people who are curious about the development process that old cliche about an overnight success that was months in the making. Adopt A Station would never have existed without Semipublic’s financial dataset.

Public Media: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver

About a month and a half before this episode aired, we got an email from a producer at Last Week Tonight who wanted to talk on background. It was a great chat, they only wanted to get some basic information, but at the end of the interview I asked if it would be possible to do a small shout-out to Adopt A Station during the show to drive more donors to stations.

As it turns out, not only did Adopt A Station get a shout-out (it was the link John Oliver’s auction site sent visitors to if they couldn’t afford to buy anything) but they used Semipublic’s data and research heavily during the segment.

Adopt A Station’s web traffic exploded, of course, and the publicity gave us the perfect opportunity to announce we were forming a nonprofit, a plan we’d been working on for several weeks. It also opened up an incredible amount of opportunities for our non-profit, several of which will be part of our upcoming announcement.

2026 Local Journalism Researchers Workshop

Finally, I was lucky enough to present at the Local Journalism Researchers Workshop in Washington, DC last week. It was incredibly meaningful because not only did Semipublic get to present its research (as a nonprofit!) to a crowd of peers, but I also met researchers that cited our work in their own presentations. It’s an incredible feeling to see our research being reexamined and reused, even after all of these months.

Here’s to many more of those moments. Happy Birthday, Semipublic.

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Last summer, Semipublic took a big leap: We made a pledge to always make Semipublic’s CPB data freely and easily accessible to everyone. To prove it, we uploaded the industry’s AFRs (Annual Financial Reports) and FSRs (Financial Summary Reports) from FY23 that got us off the ground to a public GitHub repository for anyone to download and use. Since then, we’ve expanded the types of data we make freely available, creating easy ways to track industry layoffs as well as a central place for public media job listings, complete with analytics comparing the previous month’s openings.

Today, we’re announcing the next step in fulfilling our pledge. All last year, public media stations submitted AFRs and FSRs (from FY24) in the hopes that the Corporation for Public Broadcasting would retain its federal funding. It did not, of course, but before they dissolved in January, CPB was able to send out several funding packages (albeit small) to stations, presumably using financial information already collected from those stations. Semipublic was not successful in petitioning CPB to publicly release FY24’s AFRs and FSRs, so we had to gather the documents that have been made public ourselves. As of today, all 150+ we found have been uploaded to our new GitHub, free to access for anyone.

Combing through the websites of over 500 public media entities is incredibly hard work, especially while Semipublic is in the process of forming as a nonprofit. That’s why we created a GoFundMe to support our growth back in November.

Local journalism is in crisis across the U.S. and we’re proud to have created a unique place where donors, foundations, journalists, and industry workers can get detailed information about what’s currently happening in public media. As of this writing, we’re only $1,000 away from our goal: If you value our work, please contribute right now.

Our work with FY24’s AFRs and FSRs isn’t done. Your donation right now helps us search for more documents, extract their data, and publish meaningful, actionable insights about public media’s finances to people who could use it. It also allows us to do the same for the rest of public media’s data.

Otherwise, we’ll be publishing analyses of our FY24 financial dataset soon. Please subscribe to keep up with our latest updates. To learn more about what’s on the horizon for Semipublic (many exciting things!), take a look at this post.

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Over a year ago, I began working on my very first published piece about public media. Writing for Current, I examined the financial statements of 75 randomly-chosen public radio and television stations to see how much they relied on federal funding and whether or not it was a representative sample of the system at large. (I found that these broadcasters relied on federal funding for an average of about 13% when the true industry-wide average was about 15%. Pretty close!) My only motivation for the piece was to frame the growing danger of losing federal funding, so I was incredibly surprised and flattered when LAist’s AirTalk reached out the same day to have me on the show.

Since then, I’ve had many wonderful opportunities to share my voice and opinion about the current state of public media. I even created my own opportunity - this Substack - which I’m proud to say is growing into something bigger than me.

A few weeks ago, Editor & Publisher magazine approached me, asking if I would be interested in writing a column for them. I thought it was a natural fit: They’ve expanded their reporting on the public media industry over the past few years and published some really thought-provoking pieces from Tom Davidson about the industry’s future. Additionally, Semipublic is growing rapidly - away from a personal project into a full-fledged organization (more on that in a moment) - and there’s now a need to separate my opinion writing from our data-driven analysis. It was a perfect solution.

All of this is good news for Semipublic, especially this newsletter. Our GoFundMe to help launch our organization as a nonprofit has been more successful than we could have ever imagined: We’re less than $2,000 away from reaching our $30,000 goal (consider giving if you haven’t already!) and your support has already been put to good use. Starting a nonprofit is complicated and exhausting, but we’re nearly finished putting the organizational pieces together after three and a half months. Look for an announcement soon!

There’s also a time-sensitive reason why we need to separate my opinion writing from Semipublic’s data analysis. While we’ve been busy forming the nonprofit, we’ve also quietly been working on some major public media industry research. It’s not complete yet and we’re not ready to give more details about it (or our partner in the study), but the research is expansive, eye-opening, and, just to brag for a moment, being completed at a record pace. You can anticipate reading about our initial findings in late spring along with more regular newsletters.

With the formation of the nonprofit, we’ve decided it doesn’t make any sense to continue using the semipublic.co domain. Instead, we’ll be transitioning this newsletter to our new .org domain, where all of our insights and data tools will live in the future. Those changes will happen in the next few weeks. Our plan is to keep this newsletter on Substack and redirect the old domain to the new URL, so you shouldn’t notice any changes in your subscription.

All in all, it’s been an exciting winter for Semipublic, even though we’ve been a little quieter than usual. Many big and exciting changes are on the horizon, ones that our nonprofit believes will continue to help people understand the issues at the heart of the public media industry through research and analysis. Stay tuned.

In the meantime, you can read my first column about tackling our growing news desert problem here.

Earlier today, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting’s final CEO, Patricia Harrison, delivered her last remarks to the board, just hours before the corporation shut down. Here’s what she said:

- - - - - - -

Remarks as Prepared for Delivery

Patricia Harrison,

CEO of Corporation for Public Broadcasting

January 29, 2026

THANK YOU MADAM CHAIR.

FOR GENERATIONS, AMERICANS HAVE SUPPORTED AND BENEFITED FROM NATIONAL AND LOCAL PUBLIC MEDIA. WHILE THE FEDERAL APPROPRIATION WAS NEVER TAKEN FOR GRANTED, FEW BELIEVED THAT ANY ADMINISTRATION WOULD SEEK TO ELIMINATE SUCH AN ESSENTIAL COMPONENT OF OUR DEMOCRACY AND CIVIL SOCIETY.

AND AT FIRST MANY DID NOT UNDERSTAND WHAT THE DEFUNDING OF CPB MEANT.

FOR NEARLY 60 YEARS, CPB’S MANAGEMENT AND DEDICATED BOARDS OF DIRECTORS SERVED AS TRUE STEWARDS OF THE FEDERAL APPROPRIATION, REPORTING TO CONGRESS AND THE ADMINISTRATION HOW THESE FUNDS WERE BEING APPLIED IN WAYS THAT ENABLED LOCAL AND NATIONAL PUBLIC MEDIA TO THE EVOLVING INFORMATION, EDUCATIONAL, AND CIVIC NEEDS OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE.

YEAR AFTER YEAR, NEIGHBORS IN RURAL AND URBAN COMMUNITIES AFFIRMED THE VALUE THEY RECEIVED FROM TRUSTED, CONTENT.

SO WHY WAS CPB DEFUNDED?

WAS IT A BURDEN TO THE TAXPAYER?

WAS THIS A COST SAVING MOVE?

NO. UNLIKE IN OTHER COUNTRIES WHERE CITIZENS ARE HEAVILY TAXED, FOR EXAMPLE THE BBC AND NHK. AMERICAN PUBLIC MEDIA REFLECTS THE FREE-ENTERPRISE AND VOLUNTEER ETHIC OF OUR CITIZENS. IT IS A PUBLIC-PRIVATE PARTNERSHIP—FOR $1.65 A YEAR IN TAXES —LESS THAN THE COST OF A CUP OF COFFEE, EVERY AMERICAN HAS ACCESS TO CONTENT THAT INSPIRES INDEPENDENT THINKING AND UNDERSTANDING OF THE RIGHTS AND RESPONSIBILITIES OF AMERICANS LIVING IN A VIBRANT DEMOCRACY.

BUT IN THE WAKE OF CONGRESS’S DECISION TO DEFUND THE CPB, WE KNEW WE HAD A LIMITED TIME TO PROTECT A PROUD LEGACY AND THE IMPORTANT WORK PUBLIC MEDIA DOES EVERY DAY TO SERVE THE AMERICAN PUBLIC.

THE LONGER CPB TRIED TO EXIST WITHOUT FUNDING, INCREASED THE PROSPECT THAT OF OUR REMAINING FUNDS WOULD NEVER REACH THE PUBLIC MEDIA SYSTEM ALREADY REELING FROM DEFUNDING.

WE WERE ALSO DEEPLY CONCERNED THAT FUNDING DIRECTED TO PUBLIC MEDIA COULD BECOME SUBJECT TO NEW CONTENT RESTRICTIONS—AND THAT COMPLIANCE WOULD FURTHER HARM STATIONS AND ERODE THE TRUST PUBLIC MEDIA HAS EARNED OVER DECADES.

IN A PROFOUND IRONY, IT IS PRECISELY BECAUSE PUBLIC MEDIA REMAINS SO ESSENTIAL TO AMERICAN CIVIC LIFE THAT CPB’S FINAL ACT MUST BE TO DISSOLVE FOR THE GREATER GOOD.

AFTER ALL OF THE POLITICAL ATTACKS AND CONGRESSIONAL DEFUNDING, WE RECOGNIZED A HARD TRUTH: WITHOUT FUNDING AND INDEPENDENCE, CPB RISKED BECOMING A LIABILITY TO PUBLIC MEDIA RATHER THAN A PROTECTOR OF IT—SOMETHING THAT LOOKED INTACT FROM THE OUTSIDE BUT WAS HOLLOW AT ITS CORE.

THE BOARD AND MANAGEMENT CAREFULLY ASSESSED THE REPUTATIONAL AND INSTITUTIONAL HARM THAT WOULD COME FROM COMPLIANCE.

WE HAD ALREADY TAKEN OUR STAND. CPB WAS THE FIRST ORGANIZATION TO SUE TO THIS ADMINISTRATION FOR ATTACKS ON PUBLIC MEDIA’S INDEPENDENCE AND WITHHOLDING OF CONGRESSIONAL-APPROPRIATED FUNDING. WE DID NOT COMPLY WITH EXECUTIVE DIRECTIVES THAT VIOLATED OUR MISSION OR STATIONS’ EDITORIAL INDEPENDENCE AND WE CONTINUED TO FUND PBS AND NPR.

WE COULD HAVE SURVIVED BY COMPLYING WITH DEMANDS FOR POLITICAL CONTROL OVER NEWS COVERAGE, BY REWRITING HISTORY, BY LIMITING THE STORIES AND INFORMATION SHARED WITH THE AMERICAN PUBLIC, BY ABANDONING DIVERSE TALENT, BY SUPPORTING CONTENT THAT INCREASES DIVISIVENESS THROUGH DISINFORMATION.

BUT THAT WAS NEVER GOING TO HAPPEN ON OUR WATCH AND THAT IS LESS THAN WHAT THE AMERICAN PEOPLE DESERVE. I WANT TO THANK OUR LEADERSHIP AND COURAGE FROM THIS BOARD.

CPB WAS CREATED TO PROTECT EDITORIAL INDEPENDENCE, AND THROUGH THAT CPB FUNDED KEN BURNS, FRONTLINE, DR HENRY LOUIS GATES, JOHN LEGUZAMO, AND MANY MORE. WE INVESTED MILLIONS TO STRENGTHEN JOURNALISM AND THE FIRST AMENDMENT, AND EDUCATED AMERICANS ABOUT THE RESPONSIBILITIES OF CITIZENSHIP. WE NURTURED NEW AND DIVERSE VOICES TO TELL AMERICA’S STORY IN ALL ITS COMPLEXITY.

AND THAT WORK WILL CONTINUE THROUGH THE PUBLIC MEDIA LEADERS AND A NATION OF NEIGHBORS.

OUR DECISIONS FOCUS ON THE FUTURE SUSTAINABILITY OF PUBLIC MEDIA AND A RE IMAGINING THAT IS INNOVATIVE AND INCLUDES A STRONG FIREWALL OF PROTECTION FOR CONTENT PROVIDERS, INCREASED TRANSPARENCY, AND INCLUSIVE OF DIVERSE OPINIONS.

SINCE JUST OCTOBER, CPB HAS GRANTED OVER $170 MILLION IN FUNDING TO THE PUBLIC MEDIA SYSTEM, IN GRANT DECISIONS THAT FOCUSED ON SUSTAINING PUBLIC MEDIA’S MISSION, LEGACY, AND SERVICE TO THE AMERICAN PEOPLE. I WANT THANK CPB STAFF AND OUR BOARD FOR THIS INCREDIBLE ACCOMPLISHMENT.

WE HAVE MADE STRATEGIC INVESTMENTS THAT PRESERVE PUBLIC MEDIA’S LEGACY AND STRENGTHEN ITS FUTURE—SAFEGUARDING THE AMERICAN ARCHIVE OF PUBLIC BROADCASTING SO OUR SHARED CIVIC HISTORY ENDURES; SUSTAINING NATIONAL DISTRIBUTION OF LOCALLY PRODUCED PROGRAMMING THROUGH AMERICAN PUBLIC TELEVISION; SUPPORTING TRUSTED, RESEARCH-BACKED EDUCATIONAL CONTENT LIKE CARL THE COLLECTOR; COMMEMORATING THE NATION’S 250TH ANNIVERSARY THROUGH STORYCORPS BY CAPTURING VOICES FROM ACROSS AMERICA; AND ADVANCING RIGOROUS RESEARCH THAT DOCUMENTS PUBLIC MEDIA’S IMPACT AND ROLE IN SUPPORTING OUR DEMOCRACY.

THE FUTURE OF PUBLIC MEDIA AND OUR NATION DEPENDS ON EACH OF YOU. IT DEPENDS ON OUR COLLECTIVE ABILITY TO LOOK UPON THE NEXT EVOLUTION OF MEDIA — TO AND ENSURE THEY ARE HARNESSED FOR THE PURPOSE OF EDUCATING AND CONNECTING ALL PEOPLE. IT DEPENDS ON ALL OF US, ACROSS THE COUNTRY, WORKING TOGETHER TO ENSURE THAT PUBLIC MEDIA SURVIVES. TOGETHER, WE WILL PROVE THAT A NATION OF NEIGHBORS WILL SURVIVE.

IT HAS AN HONOR TO BE PART OF CPB’S WORK AND LEGACY, AND TO WORK ALONGSIDE CPB’S DEDICATED BOARD, STAFF, AND ESPECIALLY MY BATTLE BUDDY PAULA KERGER, WHO ALWAYS PUTS PUBLIC MEDIA ABOVE SELF.

THANK YOU FOR YOUR SERVICE, YOUR COURAGE, AND YOUR UNWAVERING COMMITMENT TO THIS MISSION.

MADAME CHAIR, THIS CONCLUDES MY REMARKS. HOWEVER, I WANT TO THANK YOU AND VICE CHAIR SEMBLER ESPECIALLY FOR YOUR COMMITMENT AND INTEGRITY. I AM NOT THE ONLY ONES GRATEFUL FOR YOUR SERVICE. PLEASE WATCH THESE VIDEOS FROM OUR COLLEAGUES ACROSS THE SYSTEM.

# # #

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Yesterday, Wyoming’s Joint Appropriations Committee voted to strip Wyoming Public Media of any state funding for 2027 and 2028 - a total of $1,698,084. State Representative Ken Pendergraft explained his reasoning after introducing the global amendment:

It is not the concept of government to have a media extension like Pravda [the former official newspaper of the Soviet Communist Party]. Government monies should go for government programs. If Wyoming Public Radio, if NPR, if all of these elements, are as good as they say they are, let them compete on the free market with everybody else.

Senator Mike Gierau, one of two Democratic members on the committee, pushed back, calling the move a “slippery slope:”

As far as I’m concerned, public radio is a place for free exchange of public ideas, just like a university is. We’ll be talking about that a lot this afternoon, about stifling the free exchange of public ideas.

While the cut was only a small part of the $40 million in total budget reductions for the University of Wyoming approved by the committee, the loss of over $800k a year could be so devastating to WPM that, according to General Manager Christina Kuzmych, the station would have to cut at least eight personnel. (Semipublic is currently tracking industry layoffs at layoffs.semipublic.co.)

WPM has already lost about 10% of its budget to CPB funding cuts: Would the situation be that dire following the loss of state funding?

The good news (if there is any) for WPM is that their latest financial report from the University of Wyoming shows that the station’s net position is quite significant, over $6 million. Not only that, but the station was slightly revenue-positive in both FY24 and FY25 - nearly enough to make up for the rescinded CPB Community Station Grant of around $500k.

The bad news is that state funding made up around 16% of WPM’s revenue in FY25. Combined with the loss of CPB funding, that would be nearly 30% of the station’s budget gone every year for eternity.

Let’s assume, as we always do, that WPM’s yearly revenue and expenses magically stay the same following FY25. As you can see in the graph above, subtracting CPB funding from FY26’s budget would amount to a small decrease in the station’s revenue, around $100k. Adding in the loss of state funding in FY27, however, shows the beginning of a pronounced decline.

In this theoretical scenario, WPM is in a relatively strong position to ride the revenue losses out: Their net position, most of which is comprised of assets that can be converted to cash within 12 months, would turn negative in around seven years. Compare that to other stations we’ve analyzed in the past that have only had a few years of runway…or none at all.

Still, the station’s revenue losses would be pronounced - about $900k a year. That’s nothing to shake a stick at, especially in an industry whose operating environment gets more hostile every year.

In the meantime, Wyoming lawmakers have until early March to debate and amend the state’s budget. If the funding cut to WPM passes, the state will join two others that have zeroed funding for public media: Indiana and Florida. It’s part of a worrying trend of states across the country, and not just those with Republican majorities, slashing appropriations for the industry.

Tuesday afternoon, the Board of Directors of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting formally voted to dissolve the nonprofit corporation. While a White House-led rescission and a quiet exclusion from the federal budget by Congress caused CPB to pare down operations in October, political and legal vulnerability was the final blow that closed the operation.

Here’s how they framed it in their press release:

CPB’s Board determined that without the resources to fulfill its congressionally mandated responsibilities, maintaining the corporation as a nonfunctional entity would not serve the public interest or advance the goals of public media. A dormant and defunded CPB could have become vulnerable to future political manipulation or misuse, threatening the independence of public media and the trust audiences place in it, and potentially subjecting staff and board members to legal exposure from bad-faith actors.

Semipublic has been on break over the holidays and I’d hoped to return with a much more optimistic post to begin 2026. To be clear, there’s a lot for public broadcasting to be hopeful about: Individual giving is up, audience members are engaged, and there are an incredible number of individuals and organizations devoted to ensuring public broadcasting’s future. But the official end of CPB is a solemn reminder that everyone in public media, even stalwart organizations like the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, is vulnerable to closing, even with an uptick of financial support.

It wasn’t a secret that CPB had identified the end of January 2026 as their final days of existence - I wrote a reflection on what it would mean for public media’s future when they began shuttering on October 1st - but Tuesday's vote and press release were a bit surprising to me. There are several people, myself included, who had assumed that CPB would use some of their remaining resources to go dormant for a period of time instead of fully dissolving. Even if you aren’t holding out hope that a future Congress would re-fund public media, the laws and frameworks that govern the industry, and especially CPB, still exist. They haven’t been repealed.

There’s always legal liability inherent in any nonprofit organization, but there presumably was enough left in the coffers to continue funding liability insurance for at least a handful of years. And the remaining two board members had terms that expired in 2028. In a very hopeful, theoretical future where Congress decided to fund public media again, the Corporation would merely have to reactivate instead of starting from scratch. So why did the board choose to dissolve?

Of course, one of the biggest dangers of keeping CPB alive was the appointment of hostile board members by the current Administration. The only two board members remaining were both nominated by President Biden, which presumably means that the White House would have been allowed to hand-pick five replacements from the Republican Party.

But I was more struck by the wording CPB used in Tuesday's press release. It mentions vulnerability to future “political manipulation and misuse,” but also to “legal exposure from bad-faith actors.” In terms of lawsuits from private actors, there are probably several that unfriendly parties could potentially bring to be a nuisance, but it would be pointless. Public media is de-funded, the money has been distributed. CPB is licked.

There was, however, a much more pressing legal issue for the Corporation: Not the lawsuit CPB settled in November with NPR, but the outcome of that lawsuit.

To recap, NPR took CPB to court after the Corporation awarded a sizable grant to a new audio distribution company and none to the Public Radio Satellite Service, a satellite distribution entity owned by a collection of stations that contract NPR to run the company. (Full disclosure, I worked for NPR from 2015-2024, two of those years with PRSS). In November, CPB agreed to restore funding to PRSS (without altering the grant to the new distribution entity) through NPR, thus settling the legal dispute.

A lot of excellent journalism and analysis has already been written about the lawsuit so I won't go into more detail about it here, but NPR’s contention, which CPB strongly denied, was that the Corporation bent to political pressure. I'm not going to posit on who exactly was right, but it's clear that PRSS needed the money to continue to operate. It's also clear that CPB was backed into an impossible corner with the announcement of Executive Order 14290: The Corporation could either bend to a high political and likely unconstitutional executive order by refusing to send funds directly to NPR, or ignore the executive order and risk punitive action while the executive order’s legality was being argued in court.

It’s possible CPB chose the former option with the intention of going dormant later, knowing that they'd eliminated as many potential political and legal challenges as they could. The settlement with NPR, therefore, would have made that option impossible: Federal money was sent directly to NPR, violating the executive order and opening the Corporation up to further legal and political liability.

No matter what the real truth is, I think it's clear that CPB was always doomed to dissolve. Their fate was sealed the moments President Trump signed the executive order and issued the rescission.

In any case, it's time for public broadcasting to look forward. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting loyally discharged its duty for nearly six decades and now it's unlikely to come back; whatever comes next will need to be more modern, responsive, and resilient in order to meet the task at hand.

One of the reasons why I started Semipublic was to gather the data and analysis needed to figure out what that is. I hope you'll join us.

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Earlier this month, we launched Adopt A Station Un-Wrapped, a fun web app that connects potential donors to a small public media station through a series of questions.

The interface is simple: Users answer three easy questions - their favorite weekday (minus Friday, I’ll get to that later), their favorite animal, and favorite kind of event - and are then paired with a public media station based on those answers along with a quick explanation of why. But most importantly, they’re given links to the main website and donation portal of their "perfect match” station.

At first blush, it’s easy to assume that Un-Wrapped matches are completely random. How can you assign a personality to both a random person and a public media station and match them together? The answer, it turns out, isn’t that complicated…if you have every public media Facebook post from the past twelve months.

When I started Semipublic back in April, we were focused on station finances and their reliance on federal funding. But as interest in the industry grew — as well as the threat of federal funding cuts — so did the scope of Semipublic. We started tracking and providing unique insights about industry 990s, lobbying disclosures, layoffs, and hiring trends. Soon, Semipublic was much more than a newsletter: We became a central place for donors, journalists, and public media fans to get information about what was happening in public media.

Public media in the U.S. is rapidly changing, and a central, independent organization dedicated to tracking these changes is needed now more than ever. That’s why we’re proud to announce that we are launching Semipublic as a non-profit 501(c)(3). And we need your help getting started.

We’re asking for your help to raise $30,000, enough to launch Semipublic as a 501(c)(3). You can do that by giving at our GoFundMe - or by becoming a paid subscriber.

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Background

One of the main missions of Semipublic (including the new non-profit we’re spinning off) is to watch and analyze the public media industry through its data. Since the beginning of November, we’ve pulled back a bit on publishing on Substack in order to focus on forming the non-profit and begin gathering a broader variety of public media data. That includes social media - one of the most public and easily-accessible ways for listeners and viewers to interact with radio and television stations.

Public media stations are particularly prolific on Facebook, where Semipublic has gathered over 100,000 posts from the past 12 months. This data is extremely valuable in tracking the industry for several reasons:

• First is that, while some stations post all of their local journalism and content to Facebook, most will curate a selection of their best for their social media audience. This helps identify what stations themselves perceive as being important to communicate.

• Second is tracking the variation in relative engagement among station posts. Before Thanksgiving, we posted a quick study into which Facebook posts performed the best in 2025, which happened to be posts about No Kings protests.

• And finally, stations will periodically post public updates about their own operations, especially concerning personnel changes or fundraising/grant outcomes. There is currently no way to track how much money stations have received week-to-week (that doesn’t involve self-reporting) and a major goal of ours is to develop a method to estimate fundraising and grant totals using public reporting through social media.

But what else do you do with an enormous dataset - one that required a lot of time and attention to gather - when these objectives are complete, or on the back-burner?

Preparing Station Data for Un-Wrapped

Semipublic has a secondary mission, which I discovered a bit by accident in July when I quickly launched Adopt A Station: When there is a service gap or opportunity identified through our primary mission (data analysis and insights), Semipublic will create a product, if possible, to meet that need.

I’ve always been a fan of Spotify Wrapped, the year-end summary they provide for all users, and while Semipublic doesn’t have a user dataset to generate insights from like Spotify, there were certainly opportunities to pull basic patterns out of station Facebook posts that could connect an Adopt A Station visitor with a station in need. So, I picked three easy, somewhat arbitrary datapoints that are unobtrusive to ask users about and have some way to quantify through Facebook post data: Day of the week, name of an animal, and name of an event. I also set a boundary for stations that I’d be connecting users with, as well as performing Facebook post analyses on: They had to be categorized as “small” according to CPB’s guidelines, which meant > $800k total revenue for radio stations and > $2.3m total revenue for TV stations. For stations that I had Facebook data for, that turned out to be about 30.

The simplest metric of the three was day of the week. I wanted to encourage variety among days of the week picked, so I narrowed the days measured down to Monday through Thursday. Thankfully, there was at least one station that averaged the most posts on each of the four weekdays, with Thursday being the most popular by a fraction of a percentage.

Types of animal and event were much harder: There are an indeterminate amount of words that can be used for both that not only needed to be extracted from post text but also then ranked by occurrence. And this needed to happen for every single small station.

For this task I combined n8n, the automation tool, with an LLM. Despite the recent pessimism about AI, it remains an incredibly powerful tool for low-level categorization tasks. In the automation, each station and its Facebook post data were summoned individually. Then, they were fed to a free, non-training LLM (Z.ai’s GLM 4.5 Air) that was instructed to examine all posts and rank the event or animal nouns that occurred the most in an array. Finally, the data was saved to a new public-facing Postgres server for later use with the Un-Wrapped web app.

Serving The Results

With the data already sorted and ranked for the small stations, the last two goals were to make a simple, attractive interface as well as the final automation that would serve a station match back to users.

For the first goal, I once again used bolt.new, a “vibe-coding” tool that uses Anthropic Claude models to create website front-ends. Three questions are presented to the user, one on each page, and the results are then sent by webhook back to my n8n server for processing. The Un-Wrapped website then waits for a webhook response with the user’s station match.

When the webhook first reaches the n8n server, the automation first double-checks that the origin of the webhook is unwrapped.adoptastation.org. Then, it filters stations by the weekday chosen by the user, only keeping stations whose busiest posting day on Facebook was that specific weekday. Then, the same free LLM from before is instructed to examine the animal and event names provided by the user and match them to the remaining stations using the arrays gathered earlier. In this way, the arrays act as a sort of ranked-voting system, assigning heavier weights to matching nouns that are higher in the arrays. Finally, the LLM matches the two choices to a station and returns the answer as a response to the original webhook with links to the station’s website and donation portal. If no matches are found, then the LLM will pick a station at random to respond back with.

And, just for fun, the user also gets back a horoscope-like description based on personality traits assigned to the station. Because why not?

Value to Users, Value to Semipublic

In the end, we’ve accomplished several objectives. The first being an interesting alternative use for a 100,000+ dataset of social media posts.

We’ve also demonstrated several easy ways to not only extract text-based metrics from social media posts but also give them meaning.

And finally - most importantly - we’ve created another way for potential donors to interact with and discover lesser-known public media stations, all of which was accomplished inside of a week.

You can find Adopt A Station Un-Wrapped at unwrapped.adoptastation.org. Give it a try, see which stations you get paired with, and let me know what you think!

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Yesterday, the Arkansas Educational Television Commission, the governing body of what used to be known as Arkansas PBS, voted to end the state’s affiliation with PBS - the first network to officially do so. “A careful and considerate organization-wide review of operations, partnerships and sustainability revealed that annual PBS membership dues of nearly $2.5 million was simply not feasible for the network or our Foundation,” the network, now known as Arkansas TV, wrote in a release.

In the meeting, the network’s CFO, James Downs, made an interesting observation: In the commission meeting, he remarked that at their current spending rate, Arkansas TV “would have a $6 million deficit by the 2030 fiscal year.”

A deficit of that size - 30% of the network’s total revenue in FY24 - would be devastating to a public television entity that, presumably, has lost federal funding forever. While we can’t see into the network’s day-to-day operations, we can look back into Arkansas TV’s previous financial disclosures to see how much the network already stands to lose this fiscal year and in the next four fiscal years.

Based on Arkansas TV’s financial disclosures alone, it looks like their deficit in FY30 could be much more than $6 million…even after dropping PBS.

The Balance Sheet, Pre-Rescission

In FY24, Arkansas TV reported a total revenue of just over $20 million on their Annual Financial Report (AFR) to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The network received grants from CPB for around $2.6 million. Arkansas Educational Television Network (AETN) also registered grants from the U.S. Department of Education for about $3.3 million (possibly through funds from the CARES and ARP Acts). The previous fiscal year, the network reported a total revenue of $18 million and received similar grants from both entities: About $2.6 million once again from the former, and $2.5 million from the latter.

A quick look at AETN’s audited financial statement from FY24 shows that only about a quarter of the network’s revenue came directly from its stations - the rest came from distributions from other Arkansas state entities.

Conversely, the network reported $19 million in expenses for FY24 and $17 million for FY23 on AFRs for those fiscal years, a net gain of about $1 million for both. On its AFS, AETN also reported $5.6 million in cash on hand in FY24.

Projected Losses

Let’s pretend that AETN’s relative revenues and expenses will stay the same over the next five fiscal years, or until FY30. From an FY24 revenue of $20 million, the network is automatically losing $2.6 million from CPB grants beginning this current fiscal year, FY26. We will also assume that Department of Education grants were not extended during FY25 - either due to grant freezes or the end of CARES/ARPA distributions in Arkansas - subtracting another $3.3 million in revenue from FY25 onward.

One bright spot, as reported by the Arkansas Advocate, is that the foundation was able to find $1.5 million extra to put towards expenses at the end of FY25.

All of this means that in FY25, the AETN’s estimated revenue would have been about $18.2 million - A loss of almost $3.3 million in DOE grants and a slight gain of $1.5 million.

In FY26, however, AETN’s estimated financial woes would begin to grow: Revenue would drop down to about $14 million with the loss of both CPB and DOE grants while estimated expenses would drop to $16.5 million after leaving PBS and saving $2.5 million.

With a starting cash balance of $5.6 million in FY24 and a burn rate of $2.4 million beginning in FY26, it would only take until FY28 for AETN to incur a negative balance.

By FY30, Arkansas Educational Television Network would have an estimated deficit of over $7 million - slightly more than stated in yesterday’s meeting - even after leaving PBS.

Justifying the Means

Yesterday’s decision by AETN to leave PBS is significant because there are many public television stations in a similar predicament that have at least considered taking the same action. AETN was almost certainly looking at a yearly burn rate of twice their PBS dues, any responsible station leader would have to weigh any option to stop the bleeding.

But as I’ve mentioned before, local programming is expensive, especially for public television: Salaries must be paid, studios must be available, electricity for bright lights and heavy cameras must flow. Maintaining the same level of production quality could actually turn out to be more expensive than paying network membership fees.

Only several years of time will tell if AETN’s gamble to drop PBS will help stabilize their budget. In the meantime, any station - radio or television - considering the same action should carefully crunch the numbers to make sure they’re making the right call.

If you enjoyed this post, please consider supporting Semipublic with a paid subscription, or through our GoFundMe. And, as always, please leave a like. It’s very much appreciated.

It’s been a very big few weeks for me personally. Not just because of Semipublic and Adopt A Station’s television appearance, or our non-profit announcement, or our GoFundMe, or any of our other media appearances, but because my wife and I welcomed our second child into the world.

Things have been incredibly overwhelming since then, especially with forming the non-profit, so I need to acknowledge this from the start of today’s newsletter: My writing output is going to decrease for the next few weeks. Semipublic isn’t going anywhere - in fact, I’m currently adding several incredibly complicated systems to our data-gathering arsenal and growing the organization - but my tired newborn brain is a limiting factor.

Also, as you may or may not know, Semipublic and Adopt A Station recently made a big appearance on Last Week Tonight with John Oliver’s season finale. I was very lucky to have been able to help guide the show’s writers as they were crafting the show and I think the final product is a perfect encapsulation of Semipublic’s new non-profit mission: Our information was used both as a backbone and a primary, quoted source of data for what was an incredibly good and detailed primer on public media and what’s happened with its federal funding viewed by untold thousands of people. We were also able to compliment that understanding with a product viewers could take direct action on: Adopt A Station.

We are a central place for data and insights about an industry in flux - and when we can, we make impactful products based on those data and insights.

Now that we’ve demonstrated impact, we’re launching our own non-profit to grow it even more. Data collection and analysis is expensive and time-consuming: If you value what we do at Semipublic, help us out by giving to our GoFundMe.

Okay, on with today’s newsletter:

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It’s been over two decades since Mark Zuckerberg and his Harvard roommates launched Facebook. According to the Pew Research Center, apart from YouTube, there are no other social media sites that beat Facebook’s audience hold on any demographic, including age, gender, income, and race and ethnicity.

It should be no surprise, then, that 85% of public media stations run and regularly post to a Facebook account. It is the most ubiquitous digital platform in the industry, beating out Instagram (only about 80% of stations use the image-based social media platform) and is second only to stations websites.

Unfortunately, social media trends in public media aren’t very well understood. That’s why Semipublic recently embarked on a mission to collect every Facebook post by a public media station between January 1, 2025 and now, over 113,000 entities.

For our first analysis, we wanted to answer a simple question: What content moved the needle with public media Facebook users this year?

It probably won’t be a surprise to hear that, since the rescissions package passed in July, I’ve spent most of my time thinking about how that’s affected public media as an industry. Coming into this analysis, my assumption was that it played a significant part in stations’ Facebook post strategy. Turns out, it didn’t.

As you can see in the first graph, public media stations post about 2,500-3,000 unique posts a week. Those numbers didn’t seem to be affected at all by the votes to end public media’s federal funding. Even separating out Facebook posts by reference to federal funding or the rescission package between July 18 and now showed an extremely small percentage - barely 1% of 38,000 posts.

But we’re not concerned with total Facebook post output by stations, we want to know what audiences actually responded to, and the best way to calculate that is through engagement rate:

According to social media scheduling app HootSuite, the average engagement rate for posts by the media and entertainment industry in 2025 is 0.8%. Public media’s is much lower at 0.12%. In fact, there were only four stations whose average was above the media and entertainment’s average: KUT Austin, WKU Public Radio, KUCB, and Blue Ridge Public Radio.

When averaged out by day, there are two that stand out: June 14th and October 18th, two days when No Kings protests were happening nationwide. Users engaged much higher than the public media industry average, and even higher than the media average.

What’s interesting is that the average engagement rate on October 18th, the day of the second nationwide protests, was 1.8%, and the average engagement of posts that mentioned the key words “no kings” had a 4% engagement rate. Compare that to July 18th, which only had a 0.18% average engagement for all public media Facebook posts, and to posts containing the keywords “federal funding,” “CPB,” or “rescission,” which had a 0.47% average engagement.

Just The Beginning For Our Social Media Analysis

What should public media’s social media managers take away from all of this? The good news is that, despite the many challenges facing the industry, there’s still reporting that appeals to public media’s Facebook users and causes them to interact with station many multiples more than usual. The bad news is that the impactful reporting they responded to wasn’t about losing federal funding.

We know individual donations are still up, maybe the hopeful middle ground is that audience members still believe in a show-don’t-tell demonstration of value.

Like I said before, this is only the beginning of our social media analysis. We’ll be turning over Facebook data for deeper insights as well as expanding to other platforms soon. Until then, have a great Thanksgiving!

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When I started Semipublic all the way back in April, I was focused on creating a newsletter that provided insights into station finances and their reliance on federal funding. But as interest in the industry grew — as well as the threat of federal funding cuts — so did the scope of Semipublic. We started tracking and providing unique insights about industry 990s, lobbying disclosures, layoffs, and hiring trends. Soon, Semipublic was much more than a newsletter: We became a central place for donors, journalists, and public media fans to get information about what was happening in public media.

After Congress officially rescinded public media’s federal funding, we put our data to use, creating a website that helped people understand which stations were most at risk and how to donate to them. Thus, Adopt A Station was born. Since July, over 45,000 people have visited the site.

We have directed thousands of donations to local public media stations thanks to reporting from outlets like The New York Times, Axios, and Vogue. Using our data, we’ve also launched the Public Media Layoffs Tracker and a jobs website just for public media.

Public media in the U.S. is rapidly changing, and a central, independent organization dedicated to tracking these changes is needed now more than ever. That’s why we’re proud to announce that we are launching Semipublic as a non-profit And we need your help getting started.

How You Can Help:

Up until now, Semipublic has operated on the small amount of revenue generated through our Substack. We’re incredibly proud of the national impact we’ve had with so few resources, but we can do much more.

We’re asking for your help to raise $30,000, enough to launch Semipublic as a non-profit and pay for the following over the next six months:

➔ National public media analytics dashboard:

A central, free, and accessible dashboard that visitors can use to view nationwide or state trends in public media as well as information about specific stations. Right now, there is no place to track changes in the public media industry in real time — your support will help us make the first website of its kind anywhere.

➔ Adopt A Station advocacy:

Thousands of donations have been sent through Adopt A Station, but the work to continue generating awareness never ends. You can help us fund our plans to expand the site’s reach through campaigns and volunteer programs.

➔ Upkeep of Semipublic’s websites and servers:

Semipublic runs a sophisticated network of SQL servers, web scrapers, analytics platforms, and websites. We need your help to keep them running and expand as we grow.

Who Is Semipublic?

Right now, Semipublic is run by founder Alex Curley and a small team of six volunteers. We are currently assembling a Board of Directors.

About Me

I’m a former Product Manager based out of Asheville, NC. Last year when Hurricane Helene devastated our region, I transitioned from working in public media to relying on public media, a story I recently got to share with Arizona Senator Mark Kelly and Kentucky Representative Morgan McGarvey.

When my toddler and miniature dachshund allow it, my hobbies include hiking and cycling. I have also been known to review strategy video games for NPR from time to time.

Where Does My Donation Go?

Right now, Semipublic is structured as an LLC, a for-profit entity. To simplify the process, we’ve decided to route GoFundMe donations to founder Alex Curley, who will use the funds to form the new non-profit. Afterwards, the proceeds will be transferred to the new non-profit.

Thank You

At Semipublic, we believe that data drives action, and we’re proud to supply data that keeps public media stations afloat following the end of federal funding. Our impact is nationwide, and your donation helps it grow even bigger. Thank you for believing in us.

Here at Semipublic, we have long been proponents of open data in public media, especially as stipulated by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. In fact, we pulled together several allies in September to submit an open records request to the corporation asking for station financial and operating data. (We haven’t succeeded in our request - yet.)

Public media has benefited enormously from the response to the end of federal funding, which was driven by publicly-available information and analysis, but a lot of that data is either stale or drying up. So, as we were preparing for the winding-down of CPB, Semipublic began creating a survey of public media’s leaders that would serve to fill information gaps, not just for the industry and its audience, but also for funders who are looking to make an impact.

So, if you’re a public media leader, we need your help: Please fill out this survey about how your station is responding to the end of federal funding by Thanksgiving.

The survey is brief - it should only take you about 5 minutes - and your responses will be anonymized. But more importantly, your responses will be used to help tell the story of where the entire industry is right now and where it’s thinking about going in the next few months.

The end of federal funding doesn’t have to mean the end of information-sharing among public media stations: We are already working together to understand each other and to help the rest of the country understand public media’s current struggles. Our survey is designed to continue that momentum.

Last month, I published the very last Public Media Jobs Index using CPB Jobline data for September of 2025. I don’t have any regrets about focusing on the Jobline for my initial analyses (it was what I considered to be the de-facto industry jobs website), but I found myself increasingly dissatisfied. The industry is changing day-to-day, after all, I figured that I owed to it myself and anyone else who was interested in the index to create a more in-depth look at hiring trends.

So I did: Starting with the largest, I created scrapers for any job listings sites that exclusively featured public media jobs, including those from NPR, PBS, and APM. I am now monitoring daily job listings from over 15 websites (and counting).

Semipublic readers who have been around since last month also know that the process of creating over a dozen website scrapers presented a unique opportunity for me to launch something new: jobs.semipublic.co, a public media job listing aggregation website that, like Adopt A Station, sends job-seekers back to the original source of the listing in order to apply or learn more.

I also created a responsive Public Media Jobs Index inside the website, as sort of a test to see if minute-to-minute statistics on industry job listings would be useful. Turns out, they are (or I think so, anyway).

But back to the monthly, in-depth index: Not only is Semipublic tracking postings across multiple sites, we’ve also added new datapoints: Starting salary, location requirements, and similar stats from all non-profit job listings posted on LinkedIn since January 2024.

As you might expect, all of this new data show a complicated picture, where average starting salaries for early to mid-level job-seekers in public media have increased since September, but mostly lag behind other comparable non-profit jobs.

Earlier this year, I set out on a journey to collect every public media station’s financial documentation. I wanted to answer the question of what would happen when public media lost its federal funding.

Since launching Semipublic in April, my work has been featured nationally and has inspired other journalists to generate their own data-driven insights about public media. It even laid the groundwork for Adopt A Station, a website I built in 24 hours that pairs visitors with an at-risk public media station.

Altogether, the work to gather, analyze, and publish the industry’s essential data has taken me hundreds of hours. Now, I’m asking for your help: If you value Semipublic’s mission, or have ever benefited from insights published in this newsletter, take the time to become a paid subscriber for $8 a month. Or, you can buy me a coffee.

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Total Listings Up, Average Salaries Down

The good news for the public media industry is that a survey of public media-specific job boards shows better hiring in October than in September. Not only that, but total unique listings, 134, outpaced the number of employees laid off, 96. Remember, CPB’s winding-down at the beginning of the month contributed around 70, while Prairie Public, WKU Public Media, and KCRW accounted for the other 26.

Additionally, starting salaries (the bottom of a given salary/hourly range, if applicable) for entry to mid-level career jobs increased by around 30% and 8%, respectively. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the median weekly income in the U.S. was $1,196 - or $62k a year - in July, putting public media’s average starting salary for mid-level positions slightly above the average. Meanwhile, jobs website ZipRecruiter estimates the average entry-level salary to be around $32k. Public media’s was over $40k, a positive sign for public media newcomers.

(It has to be noted, though, that there are at least eight states in the U.S. in which $31.2k, the average salary for entry-level positions in public media in September of this year, would be at or below minimum wage.)

Something that I’ve been anxious to add to the monthly Public Media Jobs Index is a true comparison to the rest of the non-profit world. Included for the first time is a full dataset of all full-time or internship job listings on LinkedIn posted by non-profits in the month of October. Average starting salaries are calculated in the same way as public media’s: By taking the bottom of a given salary/hourly range, if provided.

When compared side-by-side, you can see that salaries for entry to mid-level public media job listings lag significantly behind their other non-profit counterparts, sometimes by over 20%. While the number of LinkedIn non-profit job listings is much larger than public media’s - over 20,000 versus 134 - the average salary in that dataset ($72.3k) was slightly lower than public media’s ($74.7k).

One trend I’ve been tracking over the past few months was the rise in number of senior-level job listings in public media. While that trend has abated slightly (as we’ll see in a moment), the industry’s highest-level job openings are offering starting salaries that are nearly 14% higher than comparable non-profit listings.

Interestingly, non-profit jobs in general are also showing a trend towards higher-than-average listings for senior-level positions. Where public media and the rest of the industry diverge, however, is with entry-level positions: Nearly half of all non-profit listings on LinkedIn in October were for entry-level positions, while they accounted for only a handful in public media. The good news is that, relative to last month’s index from CPB Jobline, the proportion of entry-level jobs has increased significantly.

Work to Do

With all of that in mind, here are the top lines from public media’s October hiring:

• Salaries for entry to mid-level positions in public media increased, but still significantly lag behind comparable positions in other non-profits.

• Meanwhile, salaries for senior-level public media positions remained much higher than their non-profit counterparts, even with a slight decrease in average from September to October.

• Public media’s elevated senior-level hiring was reflected in hiring for other non-profits.

• The percentage of career opportunities for employees just starting out in public media, however, significantly lags behind other non-profits.

It’s clear that the hurdle for newcomers to enter public media, while smaller than it was in September, is still alarmingly tall. And (despite my own assumptions), that hurdle doesn’t seem to be as insurmountable in other non-profit industries.

On the flip-side, movement in and out of senior-level public media positions seems to still be occurring, and with higher—than-average salaries to help incentivize leaders to stay.

We’ll see if these patterns continue as we enter the winter holiday season.

If you enjoyed this post, please consider supporting me with a paid subscription, or by buying me a coffee. And, as always, please leave a like. It’s very much appreciated.

*Edit, October 30th, 2025: When I originally published this analysis on the 28th, I mistakenly omitted another public media entity that had spent money on lobbyists in 2025: Independent Television Service, or ITVS. While the overall spending records have not changed, individual dollar amounts have been updated to accurately reflect ITVS’s expenditures.

Back in August, I published an article for public media trade publication Current about the industry’s lobbying spending since President Trump’s election. At the time, I found that public media had broken its own record for quarterly spending in three out of the last four quarters, and that 2025 had already become the 11th highest spending year ever after only 6 months. Those records were buoyed by the threat of losing federal funding from Fall 2024 to Summer 2025, and became reality on July 18th, the beginning of Q3 2025.

Despite the shutdown, Q3’s lobbying disclosures are now in and it’s official: Public media has already spent a record amount of money on lobbying in 2025. Not only that, but spending in the last quarter remained at historic highs, with Q3 becoming the second highest for spending ever behind Q2 of 2025.

We can’t know exactly how public media’s lobbyists spent their time, but public disclosures show that the industry was focused on a variety of issues last quarter and not just The Rescissions Act of 2025. Disclosures also show that the industry’s hired Congressional emissaries, totaling over two dozen, represented a varied and bi-partisan response to public media’s gravest threat.

A Record Year, 9 Months In

In 2008, the Bush Administration sought to rescind $200 million in appropriations for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, as well as end the corporation’s two-year appropriations cycle. While this isn’t the only year an administration had proposed reductions to public media’s federal funding, it nevertheless stood as a record year for lobbying spending by the industry: $2.6 million. That is, until 2025.

This year, public media has spent $2.9 million, setting spending records in the last four out of five quarters.

As I noted in my article for Current, advocacy group America’s Public Television Stations, or APTS, is far and away the industry’s biggest spender, accounting for nearly 50% of lobbying expenses ($1.37 million) in 2025. In fact, APTS (as well as APTS Action, Inc.) increased their spending in Q3 by $10k, even while NPR (31% of the industry’s yearly spending, or $890k) and PBS (19% of the industry’s yearly spending, or $550k) pulled back.

ITVS, a late edition to this article, maintained their spending level of $30k between Q2 and Q3, bringing their yearly total to $90k, or 3% of the industry’s yearly spending.

When looking at the described lobbying activities, it shouldn’t be a surprise that public media’s biggest names were mostly focused on the impending rescission. In fact, ten out of the twelve lobbying disclosures that provided lobbying activity descriptions identified either funding or appropriations as a key issue.

NPR and APTS were also focused on the Next Generation Warning System, a three-year-old FEMA program that had, in part, been administered by CPB. Stations receiving NGWS grants suffered two major blows in 2025: First, when CPB was temporarily halted from distributing the funds; and second, when CPB relinquished administration of the program following the loss of their federal appropriations.

Meet the Lobbyists

Only five public media entities - NPR, PBS, APTS, ITVS, and Connecticut Public Broadcasting, spent more than $5,000 total on lobbying in Q3 2025 and were therefore required to disclose the names of the lobbyists they hired.

Out of the 26 total lobbyists hired by public media companies, nearly all had prior legislative experience. And at least 14 had worked directly for a Republican politician in the past, over 50%:

NPR:

• Yardly Pollas-Kimble (Venable LLP)

  • Notable work history: U.S. Congressman Bobby L. Rush (D-GA), House Democratic Leadership’s Policy and Steering Committee, Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

• Nicholas Choate (Venable LLP)

  • Notable work history: U.S. Senator Claire McCaskill (D-MO).

• Joshua Finestone (Venable LLP)

  • Notable work history: Senator Dean Heller (R-NV), U.S. Representative Tom Graves (R-GA), U.S. Representative Mike Rogers (R-MI).

• Phil Anderson (Navigators Global LLC)

  • Notable work history: Special Assistant to Vice President Dan Quayle, Deputy Assistant to RNC Chairman Lee Atwater.

• Ryan Berger (Navigators Global LLC)

  • Notable work history: Policy Director for the National Republican Senatorial Committee, Presidential Trump Transition team member, Senator Joni Ernst (R-IA), Senator Bob Corker (R-TN), Senator Jeff Chiesa (R-NJ).

• Sarah Rogers (Navigators Global LLC)

  • Notable work history: Representative Patrick Meehan (R-PA), Representative Michael Conaway (R-TX), Representative Randy Forbes (R-VA), Representative Curt Weldon (R-PA)

PBS:

• Brian Ballard (Ballard Partners)

  • Notable work history: Gubernatorial inauguration co-chair for Ron DeSantis, Rick Scott, and Charlie Crist; Florida Finance Committee chair for John McCain, Mitt Romney, and Donald Trump; RNC Finance Vice Chair.

• Jordan Elsbury (Ballard Partners)

  • Notable work history: Regional Political Director of The Republican party of Louisiana.

• Patrick Kilcur (Ballard Partners)

  • Notable work history: Motion Picture Association.

APTS

• Jordan Mills (Williams and Jensen, PLLC)

  • Notable work history: Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-AL).

• Susan Hirschmann (Williams and Jensen, PLLC)

  • Notable work history: Representative Tom DeLay (R-TX), Representative Van Hilleary (R-TN).

• Christopher Brinson (Williams and Jensen, PLLC)

  • Notable work history: Representative Mike Rogers (R-AL), Representative Marge Roukema (R-NJ).

• Laura Simmons (Williams and Jensen, PLLC)

  • Notable work history: U.S. Department of Homeland Security Office of Legislative Affairs.

• Jennifer LaTourette (Van Scoyoc Associates)

  • Notable work history: Representative Steve LaTourette (R-OH), Senator Max Baucus (D-MT), Representative Robert Borski (D-PA).

• Matt Henken (Van Scoyoc Associates)

  • Notable work history: Representative Ed Perlmutter (D-CO), Representative Mark Udall (D-CO).

• Danica Petroshius (Penn Hill Group)

  • Notable work history: Senator Ted Kennedy (D-MA), U.S. Department of Education.

• Amanda Schaumburg (Penn Hill Group)

  • Notable work history: Representative Mark Green (R-WI), Governor Tommy Thompson (R-WI), Governor Scott McCallum (R-WI).

• Alexander Nock (Penn Hill Group)

  • Notable work history: Representative Matthew Martinez (D-CA), Representative Steny Hoyer (D-MD).

• Elyse Wasch (Pen Hill Group)

  • Notable work history: Senator Jack Reed (D-RI), Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA).

Connecticut Public Broadcasting

• Matt Trant (National Group, LLP)

  • Notable work history: Massachusetts Port Authority, Representative Silvio Conte (R-MA), U.S. Department of Transportation

• Vincent Versage (National Group, LLP)

  • Notable work history: Senator Spark Matsunaga (D-HI), Representative Timothy Wirth (D-CO), Senator Daniel Inouye (D-HI).

• Valerie Osborn (National Group, LLP)

  • Notable work history: Representative Frank Riggs (R-CA), Representative Peter Torkildsen (R-MA).

• Jeffrey Lawrence (National Group, LLP)

  • Notable work history: NASA, Representative Bill Green (R-NY).

Independent Television Service

• Jordan LaCrosse (Avenue Solutions)

  • Notable work history: Representative Debbie Wasserman Shultz (D-FL), DNC.

• Amy Tejral (Avenue Solutions)

  • Notable work history: Senator Ben Nelson (D-NE), Western Governors University.

What Now?

According to opensecrets.org, if lobbying spending by other television and radio broadcast groups stayed the same as 2024, APTS would have already become the 4th-highest spending group for lobbying, while NPR would have jumped up to become the 6th-highest spending group. If spending by NPR in Q4 continues at the same rate, the radio network would jump up one more spot to number 5, right behind APTS.

It’s hard to imagine, however, that the trend will continue: Democrats aren’t focused on restoring public media’s appropriations in order to reopen the government and President Trump’s executive order limiting federal funds for NPR and PBS is still in effect. Only one encouraging federal action - the disbursement of funds from the Bureau of Indian Affairs to tribal stations - has occurred since July 18th.

Maybe public media companies will continue to spend on lobbying in the hopes that bluer skies lie ahead in 2 or 4 years.

If you enjoyed this post, please consider supporting me with a paid subscription, or by buying me a coffee. And, as always, please leave a like. It’s very much appreciated.

For several months now, I’ve been tracking and analyzing public media job opportunities through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting’s Jobline, as well as industry publication Current’s PublicMediaJobs.org, and posting key insights in the “Public Media Jobs Index.” Writing a newsletter in the public eye is humbling to say the least, but the biggest critic of Semipublic is still me: After publishing September’s index last week, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I could do a better job analyzing public media’s job market.

So, I spent a few days setting up a pretty comprehensive system that scrapes listings from nearly every public media jobs site. Using n8n (quickly becoming one of my all-time favorite tools), I created dozens of workflows to scrape and sanitize the data from (so far) 9 different job boards. Most of the data is taken straight from the scraped listings, but information like salary, on-site vs. hybrid vs. remote, and experience level requires intervention from an LLM, the cheapest that OpenAI has to offer.

The result is what I believe to be the most complete indexing of public media jobs to date.

As I was setting up the jobs scraper, however, I began to think about why it was necessary to pull listings from nine different websites in the first place. I believed CPB Jobline was the best repository of industry listings when I began the Jobs Index, but since CPB closed, there’s been a real need for a comprehensive, centralized source for public media job openings. So, I decided to build one.

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Introducing jobs.semipublic.co, a fully-featured job listings website made exclusively for public media job seekers! Pulling from public media job sites and boards from across the web, Public Media Careers compiles the most important job listing information - title, company, salary, location, experience level, and date posted - and links back to the original source of the post, whether it was PublicMediaJobs.org, Greater Public, NETA, or any other website.

Job seekers can filter listings by location (remote vs. on-site vs. hybrid), experience level, and whether a salary/hourly wage has been listed. Or, they can use the search bar to query across each title, organization, and location.

Included in Public Media Careers is a brand-new version of Semipublic’s Public Media Jobs Index. Instead of waiting for each month-end, jobs.semipublic.co/stats contains a rolling comparison of the number of job postings, salary average, location types, and experience levels of listings from the past 30 days compared to the previous 30 days.

Don’t worry, the official Jobs Index will still publish at the top of every month.

What stack did you use to build the site?

Public Media Careers is a React site built in part using Magic Patterns (Claude Sonnet) and hosted on Netlify. The jobs data is hosted via Supabase.

Where can I send job listing submissions?

We are not currently accepting outside job listings - for the moment, jobs.semipublic.co is 100% a listings aggregator.

I want to report a problem or send feedback.

You can email jobs [at] semipublic.co for any incorrect listings, errors, or general feedback.

Why build another site? Isn’t this an industry newsletter?

The truth is, Semipublic has always been a robust data-gathering operation on top of providing industry analysis since I started writing about public media finances way back in January. In late July, I finally connected the insights I’d gleaned from industry data to a problem: People wanted an easy way to see which public media stations were most at risk. Thus, Adopt A Station was born. Since then, I’ve committed Semipublic to being a problem-solving operation - first with data, then with analysis, and if those two fail, with products.

Solving the problem of tracking public media through its most consequential period will always be Semipublic’s primary goal, but if I can provide value with a relatively low lift, why not?

Take a few minutes to check out the site and let me know what you think. If you enjoyed it, or this article, please leave a like and a comment. Otherwise, Semipublic will be back next week with more analysis.

Earlier this year, I set out on a journey to collect every public media station’s financial documentation. I wanted to answer the question of what would happen when public media lost its federal funding.

Since launching Semipublic in April, my work has been featured nationally and has inspired other journalists to generate their own data-driven insights about public media. It even laid the groundwork for Adopt A Station, a website I built in 24 hours that pairs visitors with an at-risk public media station.

Altogether, the work to gather, analyze, and publish the industry’s essential data has taken me hundreds of hours. Now, I’m asking for your help: If you value Semipublic’s mission, or have ever benefited from insights published in this newsletter, take the time to become a paid subscriber for $8 a month. Or, you can buy me a coffee.

Subscribe now

We’ve officially entered October, the very first time in decades that public media will not be able to rely on federal funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. I wrote last week that I was expecting some very big moves from stations to be announced after the federal fiscal year began, which I still believe is true, but these first eight days have been relatively quiet.

Of course, with the winding down of CPB came the end of the CPB Jobline. I was very sad indeed to see the trickle of job listings my server scraped end soon after October began, as well as a new error message on the website itself. I began focusing on CPB Jobline back when I launched this Substack because it was, in my opinion, the most definitive source of public media job listings on the internet. That was partially due to the fact that CPB had a relationship with nearly every public media station in the country, but mostly because the Jobline was free.

Today we will bid a fond adieu to the site, the last Jobs Index to ever feature the Jobline, and usher in a new era for tracking public media job listings. There are many other sites Semipublic has not been tracking until now - NETA, Greater Public, PMJA, to name a few - that, along with the Public Media Layoffs Tracker, will soon help us understand where is industry is now and where it will be tomorrow. But for now, let’s take a look at what happened in September.

Job Openings Shrink by Nearly Half

In September, there were only 18 listings on CPB Jobline and 17 on PublicMediaJobs.org (run by Current), a combined drop of 47% compared to August. CPB Jobline took the biggest hit compared to both last month and September of 2024, dropping by 60% for the former and almost 70% for the latter.

This isn’t necessarily a surprise: Stations with a fiscal year that mirrors the government’s, Oct-Sept, are incentivized to take course-correcting measures before the new fiscal year begins. We can see this plainly in the graph at the beginning this newsletter, which shows a shocking increase of individuals laid off from public media jobs (not even including vacant positions that were cut) from 87 in August to 183 in September. Contrast that monthly increase to the decrease in total job listings during the same period.

It’s also possible that stations did not submit as many job listings to CPB Jobline due to the impending winding down of the corporation itself. This brings up a very interesting but relatively small consequence of the end of CPB: The splintering of public media job listings across multiple boards. Jobline was a service that was provided for free for the industry, while other major job boards like PublicMediaJobs.org and PMJA’s charge stations per listing. It will be interesting to see which one, if any, will become the new default for all public media job listings.

On the topic of total jobs lost: As of this writing, over 400 individuals have been laid off from public media jobs since the rescissions package passed, while 447 new job listings were posted between the beginning of the calendar year and the end of September. My layoffs tracker doesn’t (yet) count employment cuts from before July 18th, but based on the already-assembled data, it’s clear that public media layoffs for 2025 will far outpace new job listings.

What’s Happening with Station Leadership?

Early and mid-career opportunities in public media shrank last month: Normally, mid-career job openings constitute around 2/3rds of the job listings on CPB Jobline and PublicMediaJobs.org, but in September, it was less than half. I only identified one entry-level job listing.

Because both early and mid-career opportunities shrank, senior-level positions necessarily grew to almost half of all listings. It’s hard to find official data breaking down job listings by seniority across all industries, but an analysis by remote job board FlexJobs showed that in Q3 of this year, less than 10% of all listings on their site were for senior management positions. All industries are generally looking for more experience than usual, but public media, even since the beginning of the calendar year, has shown elevated levels of senior-level hiring and openings. At least four of these listings were for station CEOs and directors.

Last month, I posited that public media’s comparatively lower salaries could be the culprit. Certainly, several executives probably initiated a job change on their own after the loss of federal funding, but we’ve also seen the outsized influence governing boards are having on major station decisions. The jury is still out on the cause, but it’s clear there are multiple factors at work.

If you enjoyed this post, please consider supporting me with a paid subscription, or by buying me a coffee. And, as always, please leave a like. It’s very much appreciated.

Last night, Semipublic’s Public Media Layoffs Tracker registered a somber update: The count of public media employees laid off since July 18th, the day Congress voted to end public media’s federal funding, increased by 70. This large addition to the count comes from the continued winding-down of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which shed 70% of its estimated 100 employees just before the new federal fiscal year began.

Today also marks the first time in decades that public media stations across the U.S. and its territories will not receive the Community Service Grants that have so far protected them from the destructive market forces of advertising and broadcast audience decline. (CPB announced last week that their remaining $7.1 million in CSG funds would be distributed to all stations according to size, between $5,000 and $15,000 per station. Pennies on the dollar compared to normal CSG distributions.)

All of this means that public media is entering a new phase. If July-September was shock at losing the industry’s federal funding, October and the months succeeding it will be the dawning of reality. I try to stay positive in this newsletter, but the truth is that the economic reality of having their revenue permanently slashed will be difficult for stations to outrun. I’ve projected that up 15% of all public media stations are at critical risk of closing, meaning their finances contained some value that was so far outside the bounds of normal that it would be difficult to recover from. I also found another 33% of stations to be at high risk of closing, meaning there was a value that was moderately outside the bounds of normal station finances.

Both of these findings are bad news: I believe that, starting this month, we will see several stations announcing that they will be closing, joining WPSU and NJ PBS.

For those stations that will not be closing, there are only difficult decisions ahead, like layoffs, service offering reductions, or mergers. Yesterday, I was struck by a remark South Dakota Public Broadcasting’s Executive Director made to NPR’s David Folkenflik about federal funding cuts:

“It costs more money to create local programming than it does to purchase national programming. That’s just a fact of life.”

As a few colleagues have pointed out, there are several journalism non-profits that are innovating to make local production less expensive. But the fact is that, opposite to what many public media fans (and some detractors) are hoping will happen, the significant loss of funding will only increase the amount of national programming that stations air. For many, the cost of a single NPR or PBS show is many multiples cheaper than the salaries and benefits it would take to produce a comparable show - not to mention the fact that producers like WNYC are offering their programming for free for many stations.

Even more fundamentally, public media stations have always organized themselves under the same tent, mostly because they shared a common benefactor and industry guidelines: Today is the beginning of a historic migration of stations from the old public media tent into the broader non-profit community. Certainly, stations will continue to identify as public media in the short term, but they will no longer have the safety of a CSG backstop. They’ll be competing for the same grants, donations, and audiences on equal footing with every other non-profit.

Here’s where the optimism comes in: I don’t think this realignment is a bad thing. There’s something very interesting happening in non-profit journalism right now, which is that, despite all of the evidence that journalism isn’t a financially stable business, small local news startups are popping up all over the country. Not only that, but they’re finding success, like The Baltimore Banner. Public media newsrooms share a lot in common with these startups - ethos, mission, sensibility - but they also have the benefit of having an established local reporting presence. I have no doubt that some will find a way to join the momentum.

There are several other reasons to be optimistic about public media’s future. Charitable foundations are opening their coffers in order to preserve local broadcasting and private citizens are still engaged enough to donate at record levels - something I can personally attest to with the continued success of Adopt A Station. Efforts like the Public Media Bridge Fund, a grant-giving venture specifically designed to help fund vulnerable public media stations, as well as the scores of people working to design an effective shared services model are working not just for the industry’s future one year from now, but several years beyond that.

As public media enters this new era of dawning reality, stations should take a moment to mourn the loss of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting as well as other public media stations, and then simply but fearlessly move on. Then, when the old public media identity has lost all of its old meaning, they’ll have to choose which tent they want to move under.

Earlier this year, I set out on a journey to collect every public media station’s financial documentation. I wanted to answer the question of what would happen when public media lost its federal funding.

Since launching Semipublic in April, my work has been featured nationally and has inspired other journalists to generate their own data-driven insights about public media. It even laid the groundwork for Adopt A Station, a website I built in 24 hours that pairs visitors with an at-risk public media station.

Altogether, the work to gather, analyze, and publish the industry’s essential data has taken me hundreds of hours. Now, I’m asking for your help: If you value Semipublic’s mission, or have ever benefited from insights published in this newsletter, take the time to become a paid subscriber for $8 a month. Or, you can buy me a coffee.

Subscribe now

One year ago tomorrow, Hurricane Helene devastated the Southern U.S., especially the Appalachians. As a resident of Asheville, N.C., I and my family watched as the generational storm tore apart our friends’ and family’s homes, businesses we cared about, even an entire town built alongside the Broad River. With no internet or cell phone service, we relied exclusively on Blue Ridge Public Radio to learn what was happening in the rest of the community.

Ten months later, I was asked to speak about the importance of public media’s federal funding on a panel with Arizona Senator Mark Kelly and Kentucky Representative Morgan McGarvey. Here’s what I told them:

I wanted to start with a personal story: I live in Asheville, North Carolina, and in September of last year, me, my wife, and our one year old son lived through Hurricane Helene. We were okay thankfully, but it was an incredibly devastating storm.

We lost power, we lost water, we lost internet - but most importantly, the storm knocked out all of the cell phone towers in the Asheville area. For a time, we had no way of contacting the outside world. The only way anyone could get real information was by turning on a radio and listening to our local public radio station.

I don’t know if you’ve ever experienced this kind of isolation before, but it’s incredibly disorienting. And when we talk about the rescissions package, which would force many public media stations to close, that’s the kind of isolation we’d be subjecting to rural communities - especially those whose only source of local journalism is public media.

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about and analyzing station finances. I specifically wanted to answer the question of how many stations would close if they lost federal funding. The answer is between 15 and 18%.

15 to 18%1 of local stations means an audience of tens of millions2. And these are not audiences in crowded metropolitan markets like DC or LA, these re people who live in the northernmost reaches of Alaska, in reservations in New Mexico, the mountains of West Virginia.

And the states that will be affected most by these cuts aren’t Democratic strongholds. Alaska and West Virginia both stand to lose at least half of every public media station in those states. Texas stands to lose about a third.

There’s a reason why every advanced economy in the world subsidizes journalism. That’s because those countries don’t want anyone left behind. This rescissions package, with the devastating cuts to public media, would do just that: We’d be leaving tens of millions of people behind, without access to local journalism, without access to emergency alerting. In short, passing this rescissions package would mean leaving them without a lifeline - and that lifeline is public media.

Thank you.

We’re pleased to announce that, shortly after sending our request to CPB, Current, the public media trade journal, co-signed our records request. We’re also pleased to announce that, earlier this morning, press freedom and First Amendment advocacy group Free Press also joined our request and sent a letter of support to CPB.

Here’s the letter Craig Aaron, President of Free Press, sent:

Here’s how you can help:

If you’re a reader of Semipublic: You are helping just by supporting this newsletter. Subscribe for free, if you haven’t already, or consider becoming a paid subscriber or buying us a coffee. Then, help spread the word about our records request by reposting on Substack or other social media sites.

If you’re a CPB employee: We are deeply committed to helping the public understand what’s happening right now in public media - whether it’s through Semipublic or any other organization that would benefit from the requested data - and believe strongly in the importance of our request. If you do too, help bring attention to our request within CPB.

If you’re a public media entity, news organization, or research group that shares Semipublic’s mission: Get in touch with us as soon as possible. We are gathering allies to help support our records request, like the State of Local News Project at Northwestern, Current, and Free Press, and need your help, too. You can email us directly at contact [at] semipublic.co.

You can learn more about the request here:

semipublic.co

We're Officially Asking CPB for Station Records - Here's Why

September 10 update: We’re excited to announce that Current, the public media trade newsroom, has joined our request to CPB…

Read more

8 months ago · 1 like · Alex Curley

More updates to come soon, and thank you for your support.

Public media is currently undergoing a profound transformation. With the end of federal funding, as well as the winding-down of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, stations are frantically reinventing not just their revenue models, but also themselves. And we won’t know what the result of this transformation will be, probably, for several years.

Much of these changes have been - and will be - accompanied by the loss of jobs. From a practical point of view, shedding administrative costs makes a lot of sense, especially in an industry where the floor for equipment costs can be quite high. If the mission of public media is to provide every community with a free and independent source of news and entertainment, after all, leaders should be considering every sort of cost-cutting measure to keep the lights on and the broadcast towers functional.

But from a human perspective, every job lost is another person entering a difficult and uncertain job market. So, to honor the human cost of public media’s transformation, I created the Semipublic Public Media Layoffs Tracker.

Updated daily, layoffs.semipublic.co shows every instance of a public media-related layoff, the number of jobs lost, and a link to the source of the information. Hovering over each day shows which events happened when (according to the news reports referenced) and how many jobs were cut. Not included in the tally are job cuts that have been announced but not enacted yet, like CPB’s wind-down or WPSU’s (reported) closure.

I recognize that there were many public media jobs cut in anticipation of the passage of the rescissions package; I chose July 18th because it is now a very significant milestone for public media. I’m hoping to incorporate jobs lost starting at the beginning of the calendar year in a future iteration.

One lesson I’ve learned since the start of Semipublic in April is how to balance complexity with simplicity: Sometimes, it’s useful to slice up public media reliance on state funding in nearly every way imaginable, and sometimes it’s better to give one simple takeaway, like which stations were hit hardest by the end of federal funding. Obviously, the conversation about layoffs in public media is much more complicated than one number can convey, but we also owe it to those affected to keep it in mind.

Check out the tracker at layoffs.semipublic.co and let me know what you think. Otherwise, Semipublic will be back soon with more analysis.

Earlier this year, I set out on a journey to collect every public media station’s financial documentation. I wanted to answer the question of what would happen when public media lost its federal funding.

Since launching Semipublic in April, my work has been featured nationally and has inspired other journalists to generate their own data-driven insights about public media. It even laid the groundwork for Adopt A Station, a website I built in 24 hours that pairs visitors with an at-risk public media station.

Altogether, the work to gather, analyze, and publish the industry’s essential data has taken me hundreds of hours. Now, I’m asking for your help: If you value Semipublic’s mission, or have ever benefited from insights published in this newsletter, take the time to become a paid subscriber for $8 a month. Or, you can buy me a coffee.

Subscribe now

Eight short weeks ago, Congress passed an expansive rescissions package that cancelled two fiscal years of federal funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Shortly afterwards, the legislative body quietly declined to include appropriations for CPB in its upcoming budget, officially ending federal funding for public media.

CPB was the first casualty of the end of federal funding, announcing on August 1st that most staff would be let go by the end of September and that the Corporation would cease operations by the end of January. Since then, public media stations across the country (and its territories) have been furiously fundraising and preparing grant applications in response. But none have officially announced their closure - until now.

Yesterday, Penn State University’s board of trustees voted unanimously to reject WHYY’s offer to acquire the broadcast licenses for WPSU FM and TV, a deal that had been nearly two years in the making. Shortly afterwards, WPSU informed its staff that the station would be shuttering by June of next year, making WPSU the first public media station to publicly announce its closure since the rescissions bill passed.

After the jump, I’ll take a quick look at WPSU’s finances and why the university declined WHYY’s offer in the first place.

Two Years in the Red

WPSU’s combined yearly financial audit can be found here. For this analysis, we are focused on page 24, the revenues and expenses broken down by TV and radio.

In FY23, which is what my dataset consists of, both broadcast arms of WPSU lost money: $103k for television and $55k for radio. That’s 1% of television’s total revenue and 4% of radio’s. The two stations relied on federal grants for about 18% and 13% of their budgets respectively.

When I subtracted federal funding from WPSU’s revenue and income from FY23 to apply them to my Curley C Score model way back in July, the dangers for both FM and TV were stark.

As a reminder, I created the C Score by choosing three ratios - current assets over total assets (CA/TA), net assets over total revenue (NA/TR), and net income over total revenue (NI/TR) - that I found to be the most predictive of financial stress in public media stations based on reported layoffs. Then, I took the calculated ratios and applied a Z score normalization to them, which subtracts the calculated ratio from the mean of the entire dataset and divides it by the standard deviation. Basically, I calculated how far above or below each calculated ratio was from the average of the rest of the public media stations I had data for.

As you can see in the chart above, WPSU FM’s net income over total revenue was many, many standard deviations (nearly 40) below the average after losing federal funding. Basically, they would have lost more money as a percentage of their revenue than most other stations in FY23 - something that would be difficult to recover from.

WPSU TV, on the other hand, also had a NI/TR below the mean, but only by about one standard deviation. This would certainly put them in financial distress, but it wouldn’t necessarily mean closure.

Now let’s talk about FY24.

Last year, WPSU’s television arm lost a significant amount of money while radio made a small profit: A loss of over $4 million for the former, wiping out a whopping 70+% of their revenue, and a modest gain of $35k for the latter, or about 2% of their revenue. WPSU TV’s federal reliance also jumped to about 30% of their total budget, while FM’s reliance was about 12%.

When the Curley C Score is applied to FY24 finances with CPB funding subtracted, WPSU FM and TV flip: The former now has a “high” financial distress score while the latter has a “critical” financial distress score. Again, it’s the very low net income compared to the rest of public media that drags both entities into financial distress, but now so does the relatively low amount of current assets, or assets that can be converted into cash within 12 months.

So what can we take away from WPSU’s finances and C Scores? The first obvious answer is that the broadcaster was already losing too much income and the loss of federal funding exacerbated it. But income losses can be overcome. This leads us to the second answer, which is that WPSU has determined their current assets ($2.9 million, which includes cash) aren’t nearly enough to stem their total losses (around $6 million, which includes CPB funding), even in the short term. It’s hard to see how they could have stayed afloat even with an acquisition by WHYY.

The Incentive Not to Transfer

Here are the terms of the failed transfer deal as described in WHYY’s reporting:

1. The transfer of all WPSU signals, including 4 radio towers and repeaters and two television transmitter sites.

2. A 5 year, $17 million subsidy from PSU to WHYY.

3. No commitment by WHYY to re-hire WPSU’s 44 full-time staff.

Basically, Penn State would be paying WHYY $3.4 million a year on top of losing $10-12 million in federal grant money. Additionally, as one trustee expressed before the vote, “at the end of the day, there’s no guarantee [WPSU will] stay in business,” meaning, presumably, that there was no guarantee from WHYY that they wouldn’t close the station and sell the assets after the transfer anyway. Calculating the value of WPSU’s TV and FM licenses isn’t straightforward, but I would guess they’re worth several million dollars in a private sale - enough for WHYY to recoup some lost federal funding or for Penn State to recoup some of FY24’s losses.

It’s worth keeping in mind that WHYY’s total revenue in 2024 was $54 million while Penn State’s was over $9 billion. This was a risky investment for one party and chump change for the other.

The real tragedies are the “1.5 million Pennsylvanians” (according to WHYY’s CEO) who will lose access to local, independent journalism, as well as the 44 WPSU employees who will lose their jobs after, essentially, being haggled over.

There may be a small chance that Penn State could reconsider - 9 months is a rather long runway considering the circumstances - but, unfortunately, I wouldn’t be surprised to see more stations skip a long, painful road to sustainability in favor of an easy private license sale over the next few months.

If you found value in this post, please consider supporting me with a paid subscription, or by buying me a coffee.