Public Radio Stabilized By Emergency Grants As Post-CPB Era Begins.

Public media leaders are acknowledging how close the system came to widespread station shutdowns following Congress’ elimination of funding for public radio and television. Public Media Company CEO Tim Isgitt said emergency funding distributed last year by his organization helped prevent what he described as a potentially devastating collapse affecting stations nationwide.

“In coordination with other efforts, we have temporarily averted a mass shutdown that would have jeopardized the entire public media network,” Isgitt said in remarks delivered at the Knight Media Forum last week.

The threat was especially acute among roughly 115 local public media organizations that had relied most heavily on support from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. “These at-risk organizations are almost all in underserved and rural areas of the country, and most are a rare or the only source of local information,” Isgitt said. “Most are small, but collectively they reach over 40 million Americans.”

Public Media Company moved quickly last summer to create its Public Media Bridge Fund, distributing $26 million in emergency grants by fall to stabilize operations. “We’ll do more in the spring,” Isgitt said.

The money has been spread across 74 organizations operating 186 public radio and television stations in communities across the U.S. The effort was designed to buy time as stations confront a future without the federal funding that had supported public broadcasting for nearly six decades. Along with the grants, the Bridge Fund has helped these stations develop and adapt to new operating models that secure their future and enable them to remain a critical resource in their communities.

The result is six months after federal funding came to an end, predictions that 78 public radio stations and 37 public television stations would go dark have so far not materialized. Many stations avoided closure by piecing together short-term funding from individual donors, philanthropic groups and government sources. Others merged with larger stations or reduced staff to remain solvent. The New York Times reported last month that donations to public media stations increased by about $300 million in the months since federal funding was cut vs. the prior year.

With the immediate crisis temporarily contained, Isgitt told the Knight Media Forum in Miami last week that Public Media Company is now shifting from emergency stabilization to help stations secure their long-term survival. “We have in our hands the agency, opportunity, and even the responsibility to build a new, enduring public media system for the next 50 years,” he said.

Isgitt also warned that rebuilding a sustainable system will require significant new investment, noting that even the former federal funding level was modest compared to today’s media landscape. “In a landscape dominated by trillion-dollar companies, it’s going to take a hell of a lot more than the $535 million provided annually to CPB,” Isgitt said. “A nation that takes democracy seriously must seriously invest in public media.”

Boulder, CO-based Public Media Company — which was launched in 2001 as Public Radio Capital until its 2014 rebranding — has also announced it will hire a program and development coordinator to oversee the Public Media Bridge Fund to support its grantmaking and fundraising efforts.