Editor & Publisher's Newest Columnist

And other (good) upcoming announcements from Semipublic.

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.