Leaders of public media stations that have embraced covering local news say the move requires deep change, but no single approach will work for every market, a new report shows.
Those were among the findings of a Wyncote Foundation report released Tuesday, based on interviews with leaders at more than a dozen public media organizations. (Wyncote is a funder of Current.) Their stations have “progressed along the track to becoming frontline local news providers in their communities,” the report said.
But public media’s response to the problems facing local news has not been “commensurate” with the crisis, the report said.
The report’s authors are Feather Houstoun, a senior advisor for journalism for Wyncote; Mark Fuerst, principal of Innovation4Media; Sarah Lutman, founder and principal at strategy, research and evaluation firm 8 Bridges Workshop; and Los Angeles–based journalist Paulina Velasco.
Several of the leaders interviewed in the report also discussed with Current their news initiatives and insights.
OPB CEO Steve Bass said that while more public radio stations are seeing the opportunity in journalism, it’s not enough.
“It’s hard, because I think it requires change within individual organizations,” said Bass. “Change is difficult to bring about in a decentralized system like ours. It’s going to require individual actions by local organizations, their leaders, their boards, their communities.”
A couple years after he joined OPB in 2006, Bass said it became apparent the news ecosystem was degrading as newspapers shrank.
He added that he had also been thinking about the frailty of a business model based on broadcast distribution of other people’s content. Those factors, and the support of OPB’s board, made the transition to news not a “big stretch” for the organization.
“At our heart, we’re a journalism organization that operates radio and television networks as well,” Bass said.
His attitude reflects one of the Wyncote report’s key findings about the depth of change, saying that news at the stations interviewed for the report is not treated as an “add-on, or ‘nice-to-have’; it is the embodiment of the mission.”
News as ‘opportunity and responsibility’
The report also found that station officials believe public media has an “opportunity and responsibility to join the local journalism movement.”
Public Media Co. CEO Tim Isgitt said he believes the report was meant to inspire and inform, but also be provocative. He added that it’s natural to ask how public media is fulfilling its mandate in the “vast and rapidly changing media and technology landscape.”
“People are looking to local public media organizations, who have long served their communities informational, educational, and cultural needs,” Isgitt said. “That’s the common mission.”
News is an opportunity, and there’s risk in not taking advantage of it, said Yoni Greenbaum, COO of Lehigh Valley Public Media.
“We as an organization bet on local news because we saw the coming weaknesses in the legacy products,” Greenbaum said.
The joint licensee launched its LehighValleyNews.com website after a survey of 3,000 people in its market found a deep interest in local news, Greenbaum said.
The research also showed that 25- to 49-year-olds were interested in an additional news source that was digital and not television, Greenbaum said.
“The younger generation is willing to support us, but they want to know what they’re getting out of it,” he said.
Making the pivot
The Wyncote report also found that commitment from executives and board members was essential for the pivot to news.
“It does take a board that’s willing to embrace some risk in doing things in a different way,” said David McGowan, CEO of WJCT in Jacksonville, Fla. The joint licensee launched its Jacksonville Today newsletter in 2021 and the jaxtoday.org website in 2022.
WJCT used the Jacksonville Today name instead of its existing brand both to change the organization’s culture to a digital-first focus and to appeal to audiences that might already have an opinion about WJCT and NPR.
“We needed to internally as well as externally separate from the mothership of the radio station in order to really get as good as we needed to get,” McGowan said. “People may have made up their mind about what NPR is. We really wanted to kind of create our own reputation from scratch.”
The Wyncote report found that no individual strategy is right for all markets, noting some organizations have acquired print or digital newsrooms while others, such as WJCT, are launching operations that are not tied to their public media brand.
Greenbaum suggested there should be consultants who go into PBS and NPR stations to help them build out their news operations, aiding with areas such as how a station builds a newsroom, how it runs, technology and a workflow that is different from radio and television.
“I think everybody needs help to figure this out,” Greenbaum said. “There is nobody standing up to provide that help.”
The Wyncote report concludes by comparing the situation public media faces to Clayton Christensen’s The Innovator’s Dilemma, which lays out how leaders have to leave their comfort zones to navigate times of change.
“The leaders interviewed for this report demonstrated this willingness to face and overcome the innovator’s dilemma,” the report said. “Their courage, confidence, and conviction stood out in every interview. And those who follow them will need to display a similar level of courage to move beyond the highly valued syndication pipeline that has worked so effectively and efficiently for many decades, to rise to the challenge of new opportunities to serve their communities.”