Introducing Adopt A Station
A site, built within the span of 24 hours, that connects stations at risk of closing with donors.
Late Thursday night, the House of Representatives ended a month-long effort to claw back public media’s funding by voting to pass President Trump’s $8 billion rescissions request. Earlier that day, I had posted a very long and in-depth newsletter analyzing station finances after losing federal funding and projecting which stations were at risk of closing. I found that this was about 15% of all public media stations, including every station that relied on federal funding for 50% or more of their total revenue.
I was talking with friends within the public media system the next day, debriefing what is the most significant event in the industry’s history since President Johnson signed the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, when an idea was brought up: What if there was an easy way to connect donors looking to make the biggest impact with stations that were truly at risk?
Introducing adoptastation.org! The process of “adopting” a station is easy: First, donate (or up your donation) to your local public media station. Then, the site will automatically recommend a station that’s losing 50% or more of their revenue to “adopt.” Afterwards, congratulations! You’ve adopted a station.
Every station that is shown by the website is a CPB grantee and lists the station’s name, location, type, and revenue lost through the rescissions package. All of this data comes from the extensive Semipublic dataset I’ve built up over the past few months.
I built this site in the span of 24 hours using Bolt and deployed it using Netlify. I hate to use the term “vibe-coding,” but that’s exactly what happened - minus some minor code tweaking.
Disclaimers
Several people have asked about or expressed concern about adoptastation.org. I’d like to address a few points here:
First, no money is exchanged through Adopt A Station. Visitors are only ever directed to a station website.
Also, I paid for and built this website all on my own. I do not receive any compensation for Adopt A Station, I am running it purely as a community service.
I am no longer affiliated with NPR, and am not affiliated with any other public media entity. I write about and analyze the industry now as an outsider.
The data fed to Adopt A Station is based on FY23 data. If you are a station employee and would like to request a change to your station’s existing data, please fill out a request here.
If you don’t know who I am or what Semipublic is, start here:
Welcome to Semipublic
Federal departments shuttering. Universities suing. American detainees sent to El Salvadorian prisons. With so many consequential events happening in the US right now, President Trump’s plan to ask Congress to rescind public media’s federal funding seems laughably lawful. Trivial, even.
Keep on Adopting
I’m honestly blown away by the response to the site. I thought I’d maybe get a few dozen visitors, but it’s been shared by thousands of people in the ~29 hours since I launched Adopt A Station. I haven’t yet heard from stations about an increase in donations, but I do know that half of the thousands of visitors to the site are clicking on a station website. That’s an incredible conversion rate.
I am actually on vacation this week (Congress is great at taking big votes while I’m not at home) and will be back with an analysis piece next week. In the meantime, take some time not just to adopt a station, but to take a deep dive into the real services they provide their communities. You’ll find that they’re a lifeline and that they deserve your support.
Thanks for setting this up, Alex. I have worked at CPB since June 2003, first as a TV Content project manager and now as Sr Director, Contract Management & Operations in the Office of the Heneral Counsel. Since 2020, I’ve been working from home in Long Beach, CA. I’m not sure yet how long my employment will continue.
Needless to say, I am sad but also agree that this it a great opportunity to make changes, reorganize, develop partnerships and move forward. If there is a group I can join as conversations continue, I would like to participate.
Alex, I'm super-impressed with this important work. Question: Are you able to show the absolute as well as relative impact on individual stations (i.e., actual dollars)? Supporters interested in targeting contributions to the most-distressed stations will want to know the magnitude of the funding gap and thus what size contribution might have an impact. Thanks!