Public media’s streaming reckoning — and what it means for local news media

What if NPR decides radio is no longer worth the hassle and puts all its efforts into streaming audio and podcasts? What if it drops the national linear feed altogether or simply lets on-air programming age out with over-the-air listeners?”

Tom Davidson, the Bellisario Professor of the Practice in Media Entrepreneurship at Penn State University

What if NPR decides it doesn’t need stations anymore?

Federal recission and shifting audience habits are forcing public media leaders to consider scenarios that were unthinkable even a few months ago.

Last month in this space, I ruminated about what might happen if a significant number of PBS stations decided to drop their memberships. Since I wrote that piece, Arkansas PBS’s governing board decided it could no longer afford PBS dues and voted to end its 55-year membership. That makes three stations that have decided to leave the system since federal funding was eliminated.

At some point, 20% of all stations? A dozen major-market organizations? The remaining members would see skyrocketing membership dues to support the central organization. In economic terms, PBS would fall below the minimum effective scale. Its operating costs would simply become too expensive for the remaining stations to afford, leading to decay or even collapse of the central organization.

This month, I want to consider the opposite scenario: What if NPR decides radio is no longer worth the hassle and puts all its efforts into streaming audio and podcasts? What if it drops the national linear feed altogether or simply lets on-air programming age out with over-the-air listeners?

While we’re likely a few years away from that scenario, I’d argue it’s less outlandish than it might seem. As audiences shift to on-demand audio platforms, NPR and commercial radio behemoths like iHeart Media are following suit. So is the money.

Weekly cume for mainstays like “All Things Considered” and “Morning Edition” have been in decline for years — off by perhaps as much as 20%, according to data from Pew Research Center.

However, time spent with podcasts — especially for news — has more than quadrupled in the past decade, according to Edison Research. NPR’s underwriting arm, National Public Media, loudly touts the network’s digital-audio work. “Podcasts have achieved mainstream dominance,” declares one headline. Roughly 70% of Americans now listen to some form of digital audio at least once a week.

Money is starting to follow those audiences.

NPR executives in November touted the fundraising and underwriting revenue from its digital efforts — more than $30 million in fiscal 2025, with $18 million flowing to stations via donations made to the NPR Network and revenue shares from NPR+ premium podcast subscriptions. Yay! Right?

Well …There are critical differences between how NPR and PBS handle those digital fundraising projects. PBS forces viewers to “localize” to a particular station. Passport benefits flow based on that selection. But, more importantly, the data for every registered user (not just donors) flows to the chosen stations. That gives most PBS member stations tens of thousands — or even hundreds of thousands — of donor prospects they can begin to nurture digitally.

But at NPR, donations go only to a station if a user proactively sets it. More to the point, NPR’s station-focused digital efforts have historically lagged PBS’s. Passport launched in 2016 (after more than two years of back-and-forth discussions and negotiations with stations). The initial experiments for the NPR Network joint fundraising project and the NPR+ podcast membership weren’t approved until 2022.

There’s a huge, if subtle, difference as well: PBS is a member association. NPR is a network.

As we’ve seen in commercial broadcasting, national networks can have very different economic incentives than member associations. Friends in local commercial television have grumbled for years that the networks have shifted their more-interesting programming and most of their investment towards streaming projects that largely cut out local stations. (That’s part of the reason why stalwart traditional broadcasters like Tribune and Media General got out of the business and why TEGNA is considering the same.)

Their biggest complaints? The networks’ streaming services are getting dibs on the best new content. Paramount+, not CBS, gets all the new “Star Trek” series. At Comcast, “The Office” follow-up “The Paper” landed on Peacock two full months before it hit NBC (and series like the “Fresh Prince” reboot “Bel-Air” are streaming only).

Sounds a bit like NPR podcasts such as “Pop Culture Happy Hour.”

At one level, that makes sense: If over-the-air listeners tend to be 55+, and younger audiences are increasingly listening on mobile devices … Well, program accordingly.

But as podcasts and on-demand audio grow — and as listeners’ donations follow — there’s a real risk that local stations can be disintermediated.

A few months or a few years from now, an unemotional executive at NPR might easily decide that local stations bring zero new listeners to these digital platforms. Those digital platforms are where all our audience and revenue growth is coming from. Therefore, keep the economic gains from those platforms for us, and let the “radio” piece of NPR wither.

Think that couldn’t possibly happen? Look back at the commercial world for another example: iHeart now makes more than half of its EBITDA from its digital audio group, even though it accounts for barely a third of total revenue. No wonder most of iHeart’s content development is focused on digital and streaming audiences.

I’ll emphasize the caution and comment I made about the PBS scenario last month: This is not a prediction, and it’s certainly not me rooting for NPR to cast its affiliated stations into a leaky lifeboat ala Captain Bligh.

If you don’t want that scenario to come to pass, start conversations with the NPR board now — not when some national / streaming-centric “reorganization” appears on the board’s agenda at some future date.

The purpose of this “what-if” — like any scenario-planning exercise — is to conceive of the inconceivable. Stations and NPR should have an ongoing dialogue about the future of the relationship.

In that vein, my next column will explore what if a public media organization decided to ditch broadcasting altogether?

Tom Davidson is the Bellisario professor of practice in media innovation at the Bellisario College of Communications, Penn State University. He previously was a reporter, content leader, general manager and product builder at Tribune, PBS, UNC-TV and Gannett. He can be contacted at tgd@tgdavidson.com.