Opinion: Data is helping to save public media. We can’t let it slip
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Two months ago, my small team at Semipublic, the public media data and analysis project I founded in April, had a great idea: What if we created an industrywide survey to help public media leaders and funders understand where we are at the present moment and what actions stations are considering? And what if we launched it in October, the first month in decades without funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting?
We spent weeks carefully crafting our questions and communications strategy and, at the beginning of October, sent the survey to every public media station in the country. That very same day, I got a message from a friend asking if I could share their own public media–focused survey, which had also coincidentally launched earlier that day. In the following weeks, I had similar conversations with two other industry colleagues who had launched surveys of their own.
Despite the differences in overall goals, we had all unknowingly launched industry surveys at the same time.
Some might consider our survey launch less than a success — crowding the market with surveys can lower response rates — but I see it differently: Public media’s biggest advocates have recognized that taking action to save our industry only starts with a clear understanding of the industry as it exists today and are stepping in to collect data to help achieve that understanding. In many ways, it was CPB’s decades-long precept for open station records that paved the way for the record-breaking fundraising and foundational giving we’re seeing today.
Think back to April of this year: National outlets broke the news that the Trump administration was preparing to formally ask Congress to rescind billions of dollars of already appropriated funds, including for CPB. While that rescission request wasn’t transmitted until June, the national discussion of what would actually happen to public media began in earnest. Two of the most persuasive arguments for rejecting the rescissions package that emerged from the resultant conversation were the devastating effects it would have on tribal stations as well as those in Alaska.
That reporting — from both Current and Semipublic, as well as other outlets — came directly from the financial documents that public media stations were required to make public by statute.
The result: The rescissions package nearly failed to pass a Senate that has largely been aligned with the White House, and Senator Mike Rounds (R-S.D.) made an extraordinary deal with the Bureau of Indian Affairs to replace the CPB appropriations for tribal stations. Additionally, foundations have poured tens of millions of dollars into initiatives like Voices Across Alaska and the Public Media Bridge Fund to shore up stations that lost a significant portion of their yearly revenue. That’s not to mention the countless ways public media stations are optimizing their expenditures and services through publicly available tools and data.
While the danger has not subsided, it’s clear that knowing more about the stations public media audiences rely on has led to significant action. It’s also clear, unfortunately, that without a mandate from CPB, the industry runs the risk of becoming more opaque to its detriment.
The next 12 to 24 months will define public media’s long-term future. We need to resist the temptation to turn inward and keep our struggles and successes secret. So where do we start?
First, we should continue to be transparent about exactly how much revenue our stations have lost, how much they’ve recouped so far, and the danger that the next two to three years hold for the industry. Donations and grants may be up, but every wise public media leader I know is preparing for a future when that giving goes back down.
Next, we should be open and honest about discussing challenges our stations are facing with others in the industry. That could be with surveys like Semipublic’s that are gauging how stations are approaching service changes, public discussions within industry groups, or even through communications to our audience.
Take WHYY’s recent purchase of WPSU, for example: Public reporting about the initial decision of WPSU’s licensee to close the station sparked an incredible amount of discussion and analysis about WPSU’s finances, its community impact and alternatives to WHYY’s original proposal. There’s no doubt that, whatever the motive for announcing the closure may have been, public opinion based on that reporting significantly influenced the final outcome, which was a transfer to WHYY with more mutually agreeable terms.
And finally, stations should continue to post financial disclosures such as 990s and financial audits on their websites as soon as they’re available, even now that CPB’s requirement has elapsed. Previous financial disclosures played a heavy hand in distributing much-needed aid to Alaskan, tribal and at-risk stations this year. Imagine how they could be used to help public media this coming year, or even the year after.
I have always believed that public media’s greatest victories came when it acted as a collaborative industry, and there’s been no better victory in the past few months — perhaps even decades — than the record support the industry’s gotten as a result of collaborative and open information about its stations. We must continue to strive for transparency, not just for our audiences’ sake, but for our own.
Alex Curley is the founder of Semipublic, an organization dedicated to providing data-driven analysis and insights about the public media industry. He spent a decade at NPR, where he worked on the Public Radio Satellite System, NPR’s SiriusXM channel, national fundraising materials and newsroom promotional strategies.
The article mis-characterizes the WHYY/WPSU arrangement. WHYY is not purchasing WPSU.
After a small subset of the University’s Board of Trustees, namely the Finance & Investment Committee, balked at transitional funding to keep WPSU on-the-air while it reorganized into a self-supporting entity, WHYY made a new proposal that would eliminate any funding from Penn State at the end of the current fiscal year. That new proposal was accepted unanimously.
The plan is not a takeover — it’s a commitment to preservation. WHYY is working closely with Penn State and WPSU to keep local programming, trusted voices, and community connections strong. The goal is simple: to keep WPSU vibrant, local, and on the air.
Time and a lot of hard work will tell if it can provide a model for other stations to emulate.