Public Media Jobs Index: September 2025
Industry layoffs, even in the two and a half months since the rescissions bill passed, could soon overtake job listings.
We’ve officially entered October, the very first time in decades that public media will not be able to rely on federal funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. I wrote last week that I was expecting some very big moves from stations to be announced after the federal fiscal year began, which I still believe is true, but these first eight days have been relatively quiet.
Of course, with the winding down of CPB came the end of the CPB Jobline. I was very sad indeed to see the trickle of job listings my server scraped end soon after October began, as well as a new error message on the website itself. I began focusing on CPB Jobline back when I launched this Substack because it was, in my opinion, the most definitive source of public media job listings on the internet. That was partially due to the fact that CPB had a relationship with nearly every public media station in the country, but mostly because the Jobline was free.
Today we will bid a fond adieu to the site, the last Jobs Index to ever feature the Jobline, and usher in a new era for tracking public media job listings. There are many other sites Semipublic has not been tracking until now - NETA, Greater Public, PMJA, to name a few - that, along with the Public Media Layoffs Tracker, will soon help us understand where is industry is now and where it will be tomorrow. But for now, let’s take a look at what happened in September.
Job Openings Shrink by Nearly Half
In September, there were only 18 listings on CPB Jobline and 17 on PublicMediaJobs.org (run by Current), a combined drop of 47% compared to August. CPB Jobline took the biggest hit compared to both last month and September of 2024, dropping by 60% for the former and almost 70% for the latter.
This isn’t necessarily a surprise: Stations with a fiscal year that mirrors the government’s, Oct-Sept, are incentivized to take course-correcting measures before the new fiscal year begins. We can see this plainly in the graph at the beginning this newsletter, which shows a shocking increase of individuals laid off from public media jobs (not even including vacant positions that were cut) from 87 in August to 183 in September. Contrast that monthly increase to the decrease in total job listings during the same period.
It’s also possible that stations did not submit as many job listings to CPB Jobline due to the impending winding down of the corporation itself. This brings up a very interesting but relatively small consequence of the end of CPB: The splintering of public media job listings across multiple boards. Jobline was a service that was provided for free for the industry, while other major job boards like PublicMediaJobs.org and PMJA’s charge stations per listing. It will be interesting to see which one, if any, will become the new default for all public media job listings.
On the topic of total jobs lost: As of this writing, over 400 individuals have been laid off from public media jobs since the rescissions package passed, while 447 new job listings were posted between the beginning of the calendar year and the end of September. My layoffs tracker doesn’t (yet) count employment cuts from before July 18th, but based on the already-assembled data, it’s clear that public media layoffs for 2025 will far outpace new job listings.
What’s Happening with Station Leadership?
Early and mid-career opportunities in public media shrank last month: Normally, mid-career job openings constitute around 2/3rds of the job listings on CPB Jobline and PublicMediaJobs.org, but in September, it was less than half. I only identified one entry-level job listing.
Because both early and mid-career opportunities shrank, senior-level positions necessarily grew to almost half of all listings. It’s hard to find official data breaking down job listings by seniority across all industries, but an analysis by remote job board FlexJobs showed that in Q3 of this year, less than 10% of all listings on their site were for senior management positions. All industries are generally looking for more experience than usual, but public media, even since the beginning of the calendar year, has shown elevated levels of senior-level hiring and openings. At least four of these listings were for station CEOs and directors.
Last month, I posited that public media’s comparatively lower salaries could be the culprit. Certainly, several executives probably initiated a job change on their own after the loss of federal funding, but we’ve also seen the outsized influence governing boards are having on major station decisions. The jury is still out on the cause, but it’s clear there are multiple factors at work.
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