How public media is adapting after federal funding cuts

This month, we introduced three new categorical tags to our donation website Adopt A Station, denoting stations that are rural (as defined by CPB), serve native and tribal audiences, or are affiliated with HBCUs. We also introduced two real-time indicators based on our new research: ‘Local Programming Leader’ and ‘Local Journalism Leader.’”

Alex Curley, founder and executive director, Semipublic

Much ado is being made for our country’s 250th birthday this month. Parades, the World Cup, a UFC fight on the White House lawn, all designed to unite a weary nation together in pride. It’s hard not to look at pictures and videos of the events and see optimism — for the present, for the next 250 years — written on the faces of the gathered crowds.

If you work in public media, however, this month marks a much less hopeful anniversary.

The rescission of public media’s federal funding in July 2025, followed shortly by the quiet refusal of Congress to fund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, was a gut shot to the industry. Donors and philanthropies alike rallied in the following months to help keep at-risk stations afloat, but industry analysts are already warning that the surge is receding. Some stations have increased their broadcast audience due to the attention, but overall, terrestrial broadcast consumption has been in decline since at least the pandemic. The truth is that we don’t yet know the true impact of federal funding cuts to public media because the transformation is happening right now. The next 250 weeks will be the most consequential period in public media’s history.

Already, there’s been a heroic effort by public media leaders to exert control over what happens to the industry during the next five years. The prevailing line of thought, favored by large philanthropies and big players like the Public Media Bridge Fund, is to create economies of scale by sharing services among stations, or even merging. Their goals, in a way, are operations-focused: They might have an opinion on how stations might change how content is served to audiences, but budget stabilization is the number-one priority.

NPR, on the other hand, is approaching the issue from two different angles: First, with a recently announced $100 million legislative initiative called the Rural Radio Resiliency Fund designed to distribute funding to the most at-risk stations; and second, with a new station dues schedule that rewards tighter station integration with the network’s digital services, buttressed by two gifts totaling over $100 million earmarked specifically for “fueling innovation in NPR’s use of digital technology.”

There’s no doubt that each of these solutions is sensible and well-considered, but they’re mostly being made with the last publicly available financial disclosures from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which is woefully incomplete and based on data that’s over two years old. And as the industry’s wild swing in major giving has already demonstrated, the economic engine that produced this data has already been disrupted. The old foundation is still there, but we don’t know if any of our past wisdom is even still applicable.

That’s why at Semipublic, the nonprofit I founded, we made the deliberate choice earlier this year to move away from research on historical data to real-time industry data. By measuring things like daily local journalism article output as well as how much original local programming stations broadcast each week, we’re able to see how stations are reacting to their new funding environment day-to-day. 

These data also present an exciting opportunity to give donors a new way to help public media stations through these consequential 250 weeks. This month, we introduced three new categorical tags to our donation website Adopt A Station, denoting stations that are rural (as defined by CPB), serve native and tribal audiences, or are affiliated with HBCUs. We also introduced two real-time indicators based on our new research: “Local Programming Leader” and “Local Journalism Leader.” Stations with either of these tags produce an above-average amount of local programming, or local published journalism, in relation to their annual budget compared to other stations. Donors probably know about big, metropolitan stations that produce more local programming than others, after all, but they may not know about a tiny station in Alaska that is producing the same amount with a fraction of the budget. 

Adopt A Station’s initial success came from the simplicity of being able to see how much revenue a station lost due to the end of federal funding. With these real-time indicators, as well as these tags, our new goal is simply to match donors with the categories they care about most.

I can’t say what will happen to public media over the next five years, but I do think there’s plenty of cause, like those crowds gathered for the Semiquincentennial, to show optimism for the future. We have the resources to move away from older data, and are already doing so, in order to make more nimble decisions. Donors are still engaged with public media despite a decline from last year’s record-setting giving and are demanding new information to help them make an informed decision. And who knows, maybe one day, public media will view July 18, 2025 as its own independence day.

Alex Curley is the founder and executive director of Semipublic, a research nonprofit dedicated to building public trust in media through data, and the creator of AdoptAStation.org. Previously, he spent a decade at NPR, where he worked on product development, satellite-based audio distribution, and editorial promotional strategy. He can be reached at alex@semipublic.org.