We're Making Public Media's Latest Finances Freely Available. Help Us Keep Going.
Semipublic is still committed to making data that can help the industry free to access. In return, we're asking for your help.
Last summer, Semipublic took a big leap: We made a pledge to always make Semipublic’s CPB data freely and easily accessible to everyone. To prove it, we uploaded the industry’s AFRs (Annual Financial Reports) and FSRs (Financial Summary Reports) from FY23 that got us off the ground to a public GitHub repository for anyone to download and use. Since then, we’ve expanded the types of data we make freely available, creating easy ways to track industry layoffs as well as a central place for public media job listings, complete with analytics comparing the previous month’s openings.
Today, we’re announcing the next step in fulfilling our pledge. All last year, public media stations submitted AFRs and FSRs (from FY24) in the hopes that the Corporation for Public Broadcasting would retain its federal funding. It did not, of course, but before they dissolved in January, CPB was able to send out several funding packages (albeit small) to stations, presumably using financial information already collected from those stations. Semipublic was not successful in petitioning CPB to publicly release FY24’s AFRs and FSRs, so we had to gather the documents that have been made public ourselves. As of today, all 150+ we found have been uploaded to our new GitHub, free to access for anyone.
Combing through the websites of over 500 public media entities is incredibly hard work, especially while Semipublic is in the process of forming as a nonprofit. That’s why we created a GoFundMe to support our growth back in November.
Local journalism is in crisis across the U.S. and we’re proud to have created a unique place where donors, foundations, journalists, and industry workers can get detailed information about what’s currently happening in public media. As of this writing, we’re only $1,000 away from our goal: If you value our work, please contribute right now.
Our work with FY24’s AFRs and FSRs isn’t done. Your donation right now helps us search for more documents, extract their data, and publish meaningful, actionable insights about public media’s finances to people who could use it. It also allows us to do the same for the rest of public media’s data.
Otherwise, we’ll be publishing analyses of our FY24 financial dataset soon. Please subscribe to keep up with our latest updates. To learn more about what’s on the horizon for Semipublic (many exciting things!), take a look at this post.