Happy Birthday, Semipublic!
It's been a year since we started on our journey to make data about journalism more available and easier to understand. Come celebrate with us!
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:
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.
Happy birthday!