Public Media's New Era Begins Today, For Better or For Worse
The Corporation for Public Broadcasting is (functionally) dead. Long live public broadcasting.
Last night, Semipublic’s Public Media Layoffs Tracker registered a somber update: The count of public media employees laid off since July 18th, the day Congress voted to end public media’s federal funding, increased by 70. This large addition to the count comes from the continued winding-down of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which shed 70% of its estimated 100 employees just before the new federal fiscal year began.
Today also marks the first time in decades that public media stations across the U.S. and its territories will not receive the Community Service Grants that have so far protected them from the destructive market forces of advertising and broadcast audience decline. (CPB announced last week that their remaining $7.1 million in CSG funds would be distributed to all stations according to size, between $5,000 and $15,000 per station. Pennies on the dollar compared to normal CSG distributions.)
All of this means that public media is entering a new phase. If July-September was shock at losing the industry’s federal funding, October and the months succeeding it will be the dawning of reality. I try to stay positive in this newsletter, but the truth is that the economic reality of having their revenue permanently slashed will be difficult for stations to outrun. I’ve projected that up 15% of all public media stations are at critical risk of closing, meaning their finances contained some value that was so far outside the bounds of normal that it would be difficult to recover from. I also found another 33% of stations to be at high risk of closing, meaning there was a value that was moderately outside the bounds of normal station finances.
Both of these findings are bad news: I believe that, starting this month, we will see several stations announcing that they will be closing, joining WPSU and NJ PBS.
For those stations that will not be closing, there are only difficult decisions ahead, like layoffs, service offering reductions, or mergers. Yesterday, I was struck by a remark South Dakota Public Broadcasting’s Executive Director made to NPR’s David Folkenflik about federal funding cuts:
“It costs more money to create local programming than it does to purchase national programming. That’s just a fact of life.”
As a few colleagues have pointed out, there are several journalism non-profits that are innovating to make local production less expensive. But the fact is that, opposite to what many public media fans (and some detractors) are hoping will happen, the significant loss of funding will only increase the amount of national programming that stations air. For many, the cost of a single NPR or PBS show is many multiples cheaper than the salaries and benefits it would take to produce a comparable show - not to mention the fact that producers like WNYC are offering their programming for free for many stations.
Even more fundamentally, public media stations have always organized themselves under the same tent, mostly because they shared a common benefactor and industry guidelines: Today is the beginning of a historic migration of stations from the old public media tent into the broader non-profit community. Certainly, stations will continue to identify as public media in the short term, but they will no longer have the safety of a CSG backstop. They’ll be competing for the same grants, donations, and audiences on equal footing with every other non-profit.
Here’s where the optimism comes in: I don’t think this realignment is a bad thing. There’s something very interesting happening in non-profit journalism right now, which is that, despite all of the evidence that journalism isn’t a financially stable business, small local news startups are popping up all over the country. Not only that, but they’re finding success, like The Baltimore Banner. Public media newsrooms share a lot in common with these startups - ethos, mission, sensibility - but they also have the benefit of having an established local reporting presence. I have no doubt that some will find a way to join the momentum.
There are several other reasons to be optimistic about public media’s future. Charitable foundations are opening their coffers in order to preserve local broadcasting and private citizens are still engaged enough to donate at record levels - something I can personally attest to with the continued success of Adopt A Station. Efforts like the Public Media Bridge Fund, a grant-giving venture specifically designed to help fund vulnerable public media stations, as well as the scores of people working to design an effective shared services model are working not just for the industry’s future one year from now, but several years beyond that.
As public media enters this new era of dawning reality, stations should take a moment to mourn the loss of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting as well as other public media stations, and then simply but fearlessly move on. Then, when the old public media identity has lost all of its old meaning, they’ll have to choose which tent they want to move under.
Earlier this year, I set out on a journey to collect every public media station’s financial documentation. I wanted to answer the question of what would happen when public media lost its federal funding.
Since launching Semipublic in April, my work has been featured nationally and has inspired other journalists to generate their own data-driven insights about public media. It even laid the groundwork for Adopt A Station, a website I built in 24 hours that pairs visitors with an at-risk public media station.
Altogether, the work to gather, analyze, and publish the industry’s essential data has taken me hundreds of hours. Now, I’m asking for your help: If you value Semipublic’s mission, or have ever benefited from insights published in this newsletter, take the time to become a paid subscriber for $8 a month. Or, you can buy me a coffee.