Public Media Jobs Index: July 2025
Job listings are still down year-over-year, but July's numbers did slightly increase despite devastating industry news.
Much has been written about last week’s announcement by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting that they’d be shuttering by the end of January. I memorialized the occasion with a rather apt Star Trek analogy, and my friend Yoni at Backstory & Strategy used the occasion to call for the end of “more of the same.” There is no doubt that the entire country, and not just the public media industry, will soon feel the weight of losing CPB in ways they didn’t expect.
For me, one of those unexpected ways will be the eventual end of the CPB Jobline.
I consider the Jobline to be the most complete accounting of public media job listings right now. I’m not sure if it’s because CPB has been around longer or if stations are more selective when creating a listing with Current’s tool, but PublicMediaJobs.org seems to have fewer listings. I have no doubt that it will pick up the slack left by CPB Jobline, but for now, the corporation’s job board remains my go-to for gauging the industry.
(PublicMediaJobs.org listings will make their Public Media Jobs Index debut next month.)
As the Corporation for Public Broadcasting winds down their operations, I’d like to invite you, whoever you are, to also think about the less-obvious (but equally impactful) services CPB has provided for over five decades and to name them, either through social media or alone with a cup of coffee. We all know about the corporation’s role in funding our nation’s public media broadcasters, but its commitment to financial transparency within the industry, the firewall it’s provided between politics and independent journalism, and yes, its relatively small role in encouraging hiring among stations, should not be forgotten.
Now, onto the jobs numbers.
Waiting for the Effects of the Rescissions Package
The passage of the rescissions package, as well as the quiet refusal of the Senate to fund CPB, has thrown a bucket of cold water on the public media industry. There have already been layoffs at five different companies since the package passed Congress on July 17th, and those are just the ones that have been publicly reported. I am currently the face of a very positive-minded fundraising campaign, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the industry experienced its first federal funding-related closure in the next couple of months. I sure hope I’m wrong.
With all of this in mind, we would expect to see at least a flattening in new job listings on CPB Jobline as stations responded to the crisis in July. But, as the data show, that didn’t really happen.
In fact, if you look at the graph above, that month played out as you might expect it to during any other year: Job listings were nearly zero the week of the Fourth of July, followed by an uptick as people returned to work the next week, and a leveling-out throughout the second half of the month.
Otherwise, the total number of jobs listed in July is still very much lagging compared to July of 2024: 48 listings compared to last July’s 65. Job listings that July were in a relative slump, too, sandwiched by hiring spikes in June and October, though 2024’s deepest troughs didn’t happen until the two months during and following the election.
Luckily, last July’s slump means that job listings between January and July of this year compared to the same period last year are only down 13%, 437 to 502. Last month, as a reminder, the drop in listings between January and June of 2025 compared to the same period the previous year was 24%.
In my inaugural Public Media Jobs Index, I explained my reasoning behind the way I sorted jobs into experience level categories:
These are subjective based on my personal understanding of public media job titles, but all executive level jobs, jobs with the word “senior” in them, and Director-level jobs are categorized as Senior-level, while internships, most fellowships, and assistant jobs are categorized at Entry-level. Everything else is Mid-level. Note that Mid-level also includes all managers below “senior manager.”
Just as the news about job hunting for new college grads continues to be discouraging, so does the number of entry-level positions posted on CPB Jobline: Out of 48 listings in July, only two met my qualifications for jobs at the “Entry” experience level. Three out of four I classified as “Mid” level jobs, and less than 20% as “Senior.”
For comparison, nearly 20% of Jobline listings last month were at the “Entry” level - a noticeable drop.
A Mixed Bag
All in all, July was a bit of a shoulder-shrug in terms of new job opportunities in public media. Job listing levels have been stable the past three months, which is pretty good considering Congress voted to end public media’s federal funding during that time, but also they’re still way down from last year’s numbers, which is bad not just because they’re down this year but also because public media was already in a slump in 2024 following the previous year’s podcast revenue drop.
Apart from what I expect will be a noticeable slump in new jobs over the next few months, the most troubling number to me is still the incredibly low amount of opportunities for early career public media employees. It’s already a difficult industry to break into - I spent three years working at a commercial news station before I could get an unpaid internship at a public radio station - and losing federal funding has only exacerbated it.
The need for experienced thinkers to lead the hundreds of public media entities through this crisis is obvious, but a successful future for the industry cannot happen if new workers are shut out.
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