A Labor Day Pledge from Semipublic

I'm making my CPB data free to access for anyone who wants to use it. Plus, a few words about the future.

Right now, I’m in a cabin in the mountains with my young family. Yesterday morning, in the unseasonably cool air, we walked to town for coffee and spent a few hours playing with our almost-two-year-old on the playground. After heading home and making lunch, we all settled into bed - or a crib, if you’re a toddler - for a long afternoon nap with the windows open. Later, my parents babysat while my wife and I snuck away for an early dinner for two.

All in all, it’s been a perfect holiday weekend for us.

But it’s been hard for me to square our perfect weekend with the recent loss of public media’s federal funding. Instead of taking a well-deserved break with family and celebrating our country’s proud heritage of labor and union action, public media workers across the country are worried about their future - how stations will keep the lights on, how to make up for lost revenue, what heartbreaking cut they might have to make next to stay afloat. All while the country is in desperate need of free and independent sources of news, entertainment, and emergency alerting.

In a lot of ways, I started Semipublic all those months ago for those workers. I thought that they, and the rest of the public, deserved an honest accounting of public media’s financial data and what might happen if the industry lost its federal funding. Now that they have, the need for free and open access to industry data is more important than ever.

With all of that in mind, I wanted to write a few words about Semipublic’s future. Things have been moving fast for Semipublic lately, as well as for me personally, and I haven’t gotten the chance to take a step back and reaffirm this newsletter’s mission and values until now. So, here it goes.

Want the TLDR version? Click here.

Semipublic: Free and Open CPB Data

When I launched Semipublic on April 24th, my main goal was to compile public media’s publicly-available financial documentation, as required by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and use insights from the data gathered to tell a story about the industry’s future. And I did: Over hundreds of hours, I visited every website of every single CPB grantee to collect their AFRs, FSRs, and AFSes from FY23 - around 1,000 documents in all - and manually input them into a database. Later, I made those documents openly available via a public Github repository.

Since then, Semipublic’s mission has expanded. I now collect a lot of other public media data, like job postings and 990s, and that data is being used in actionable ways to help transition public media into its next form. We’re helping other journalists report about public media’s finances, helping stations benchmark their own metrics against the rest of the industry, even creating websites that use data to help bring donors to stations in need.

Even with these new data, however, it’s clear to Semipublic that the information collected by CPB remains the most valuable data for helping stations survive the end of federal funding right now. That’s why, just before publishing this newsletter, I uploaded my entire AFR/FSR/AFS dataset from FY23 in CSV format (and other relevant documents) to Semipublic’s Github repository.

As I mentioned before, this dataset is the result of hundreds of hours of labor, but I believe that public media’s finances should not just be publicly-accessible, but also easily accessible. There are an untold number of people and organizations who can use this dataset for the good of public media and they deserve that chance. I also believe that all of the data CPB has collected about stations should be publicly and easily accessible.

Therefore, I’d like to make a pledge to our audience and to all of public media this Labor Day: To always make Semipublic’s CPB data freely and easily accessible to everyone.

This promise extends to those who have not chosen to become paid subscribers to Semipublic: When you become a paid subscriber, thereby gaining access to the business intelligence platform Metabase, you get access to not just my FY23 CPB dataset, but also the ability to join it with the other valuable datasets I described above, all based on my own analytical work. In short, paid subscribers are gaining access to more of my expertise. Otherwise, there is no paywall for obtaining my AFR/FSR/AFS datasets from Github: Just download the entire repository as a ZIP file or each file individually, no login required.

It’s important to me to make this pledge now because I want to grow Semipublic. In fact, it already is growing: I am now joined by Louis, an expert in non-profit and public sector strategy who, like me, is passionate about protecting the future of public broadcasting. We’re looking to strike partnerships with other researchers so that we can grow Semipublic’s work to be deeper, more insightful, and more impactful. If you’d like to join us, please reach out by messaging me directly here on Substack.

Adopt A Station: More Donations for More Stations

As I’ve recounted several times on this newsletter, I used the data I gathered from station financial documentation to launch adoptastation.org, a website that pairs visitors with an at-risk public media station. It took off almost immediately and has inspired hundreds of donations to stations that have lost 30% or more of their revenue to the recent rescissions.

There is no other way to put this: Adopt A Station never would have existed if stations were not required to submit financial documentation to CPB and then make it publicly-available. The success of the site goes directly to my argument about why making CPB data open and easily-accessible is so important

When adoptastation.org began to take off, I temporarily placed the website under the limited liability company I made for my newsletter and consulting work, Semipublic LLC, so that I could use the proceeds from this newsletter to offset the costs of hosting Adopt A Station - which so far I’ve paid for 100% out of pocket. I want to grow Adopt A Station too, both by raising its profile through social media (with the help of volunteers, like Sam, a former WGBH intern and public media advocate), but also by thinking of more slightly-rule-breaking products that would directly benefit public media stations. There is also the possibility that Adopt A Station may receive foundational grants to support its work.

Right now, the website is not a non-profit, but it’s something I’m seriously considering creating, especially if there are grant opportunities. To be clear, there is absolutely no money changing hands through the Adopt A Station website, it is just a collection of links. It took off so suddenly that I didn’t even consider incorporating it with a business or non-profit at all and had to move quickly.

I feel strongly that the missions of both Adopt A Station and Semipublic are not in conflict with another, but are in fact, complementary. My promise regarding Adopt A Station is that our work will always be in support of one simple mission: Getting more donations to more stations. Period. The website needs resources to grow, but we will only ever accept support from or strike partnerships with entities that share our same mission. Adopt A Station will also never sell data because, frankly, there isn’t any data to sell. We’re just sending people along to public media stations using public information, simple as that.

Alex Curley/Semipublic Consulting: Distinct from the Semipublic Newsletter

As any tech-adjacent worker will tell you, it’s a tough job market out there right now. There had already been many layoffs of Product Managers across the country when I was let go from NPR last October, and afterwards, my weeks without any meaningful job prospects began to turn into months. It’s probably not a surprise, therefore, that an ancillary goal of launching Semipublic was to help attract gainful employment, either full time or through consulting.

I am very lucky to have received a fair amount of attention over the past few weeks, as well as several consulting offers, mostly from the public media industry. With regards to contracts I’ve either already accepted or may accept in the future, I want to make another promise: I will always keep contract work distinct from my work with Semipublic or Adopt A Station. I am, and will always be, up front about my involvement in these two initiatives with current and prospective clients, just as they will always be up front with me about their own needs and expectations. If a conflict exists, we do not work together. This promise extends to privileged conversations or information I may have/be privy to while working in my capacity as the heads of Adopt A Station or Semipublic: I am offering my specific expertise about public media and how to interpret the industry’s data, nothing more.

TLDR

As of today, I am making my dataset of public media’s FY23 finances publicly available through a Github repository, no payment or login required. I am also pledging that Semipublic will make any other CPB data it obtains open and freely-accessible in the future.

Additionally, I am making the promise that my work as the head of Semipublic and Adopt A Station will always be in service to those two entities, and that any consulting work I may engage in will continue to be distinct from those two entities.

It has been an honor to be able to support the public media industry in so many different ways after the loss of federal funding. I consider myself fortunate to continue working with the industry I love so much in ways that I got to define myself. There’s so much I’m working on for the future, you can help out by: First, following Adopt A Station on Instagram and Bluesky. Second, subscribing to Semipublic if you haven’t already. And lastly, helping support the missions of Adopt A Station and Semipublic by either becoming a paid subscriber or by buying me a coffee.

I hope you all at the very least had a restful Labor Day weekend. I’ll be back in a few days with the August 2025 Public Media Jobs Index.