What if … PBS implodes?

Stations looking to slash their PBS membership costs can find a cheaper alternative. And that adds to the likelihood that more stations will bail out of PBS membership. ... If we want to avoid this fate, we need to act now.”

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

Read the latest -- since Tom Davidson's article went to press

Arkansas becoming 1st state to sever ties with PBS, effective July 1

Public media has faced — and survived — many financial crises over the past 60 years.   Presidents Nixon and Reagan targeted federal funding. The financial crisis of 2008-2010 crushed donations in the short term. Public television grappled with the rise of cable networks as diverse as The Learning Channel and Nickelodeon. Public radio faced the explosion of formats that carved potential audiences into ever-smaller niches.

But today’s challenges are graver by an order of magnitude. Federal funding is gone; states and universities are pulling back as they deal with their own financial problems and politics. Audiences have fled our linear broadcasts to on-demand platforms where competition is essentially unlimited.

Yes, stations are reacting with rounds of cutbacks and financial recalibration.

But we’re missing the deeper question: What if the very structures that have served us for the past seven decades no longer work?

That nagging feeling has led to a series of informal conversations with station and system leaders, which in turn have led to a series of "what if…?" scenarios I want to tease out over the next few months.

Here's the first: What if PBS collapses due to a lack of financial support from member stations?

Let’s start with this underappreciated truth: PBS isn’t a television network; it’s a member association. Station dues — essentially the licensing fees for PBS programming — accounted for roughly 40% of PBS’s 2024 revenues, which totaled $558 million. 

By comparison, underwriting and the lucrative licensing business of back-end streaming rights account for roughly a third of PBS’s revenues.

Put another way: Take away those station dues, and PBS's economics look vastly different — probably unsustainable.

Those stations are under enormous financial pressures, which have been building for years. Those pressures start and end with the loss of our core audiences to digital platforms.

I occasionally get a peek at Nielsen television ratings. Out of curiosity, I looked recently at the numbers for a major-market PBS station.

The average number of live prime-time viewers? In the single-digit thousands, out of the millions in the market.

Our fundraising models — especially pledge — still depend primarily on tune-in audiences. And they aren't tuning in anymore; they’ve moved to time-shifted platforms. This is why Passport has now passed pledge as a source of new members.

However, competition for digital viewing (like Passport) is essentially unlimited. If Julia Child were alive today, she’d launch on a social platform, not via “The French Chef.” There’s a YouTube channel for everything these days, which is why it is now the largest single source of video viewing as measured by minutes watched.

Already, those combined stresses are causing stations to wobble:

• Eastern Illinois University has already dropped its PBS affiliation for WEIU.
• In Florida’s Panhandle, WSRE’s collegiate owner has voted to do the same next June.
• Next door, Alabama Public Television is publicly considering withdrawing.
• Elsewhere, stations are teetering on the edge of closure. Central Pennsylvania's WPSU faced the threat of closure before a still-pending deal emerged that effectively gave the station to Philadelphia’s WHYY.
• And the fate of the New Jersey Network remains in flux after WNET declined to renew its longstanding management agreement for the New Jersey stations.   

PBS can survive one or two stations dropping off. But can it survive 10 large stations pulling out at once? Or, say, a mix of 30 large- and small-market stations seceding?

Tim Isgitt at the consultancy Public Media Company spoke persuasively about a potential “doom loop”: Stations close or pull out; PBS (and NPR) fees go up to make up for the revenue loss; which further ramps up the pressure on local stations; and causes more to leave the system.

At some point, the economics of the central organization will no longer work. What then?

Well, we often forget that PBS emerged years after the first local public television stations. In those early days, stations came together in ad-hoc, often regional, content-sharing collectives like the National Educational Television and Radio Center, which eventually morphed into the NET network and today’s WNET; or the Eastern Educational Television Network, a content-sharing collective founded by WGBH in Boston, which eventually morphed into today’s American Public Television.

If PBS were to disappear tomorrow, it wouldn’t be hard at all to imagine GBH continuing to distribute “Masterpiece” and “FRONTLINE” directly to stations. Or for WNET, doing the same with “Nature” and “Great Performances.”

More interestingly, KQED has been a leader in bringing California and western U.S. stations together for collaborations like the California Newsroom that stretch across media and distribution platforms.

And perhaps more ominously, there are projects like Blue Ridge PBS’s ECHO — an alternative programming service that mines archives and a plethora of production sources to provide a cheap 24/7 alternative to the standard PBS or APT programming services. WSRE is reportedly considering ECHO to replace the PBS programming it will lose when it ends its membership.

The point: Stations looking to slash their PBS membership costs can find a cheaper alternative. And that adds to the likelihood that more stations will bail out of PBS membership.

Note that I am not predicting this scenario will come to pass, and I’m certainly not rooting for it.

But this outcome is plausible, and if we do nothing, it’s likely to happen. If we want to avoid this fate, we need to act now.

Yes, that entails cutting expenses at PBS, as is already happening. But even more important is figuring out how to raise money from the audience groups who still love us but have fled to on-demand platforms. Some stations are seeing initial successes. More need to follow, and quickly.

And PBS needs to be much more aggressive in helping them. It’s all well and good to launch free ad-supported streaming channels and other forms of digital distribution.

But the bulk of station donations still come from donations, not ads. (Sorry — "underwriting!"). Generating donations from digital audiences requires thoughtful nurturing and development, and that kind of nurturing requires knowing who those users are. Too many of these distribution deals leave user data in control of the distribution partner. PBS and stations need to work together — and fast — to implement ways (newsletters, contests, live events) to get those anonymous users to identify themselves so stations can build pathways toward donation.

That work is hard. But the alternatives — including the risk of systemic collapse — are too great to ignore any longer.

Next time, we’ll look at a scenario involving NPR and its relationship with public radio stations. It’s even more fraught.

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.