As good as the first half of 2024 has been ratings-wise for public news/talk stations such as Washington, D.C.’s WAMU, San Francisco’s KQED and Boston’s WBUR, that’s about all the good news there’s been amid layoffs at these and many other public radio stations.
Following NPR’s 10% staff cutback last year, 2024 has seen 25 workers pink-slipped at KQED, 15 at WAMU, 31 at Boston’s WGBH along with 14% of WBUR’s workforce, 14 at Chicago Public Radio, and 15 at Colorado Public Radio.
Not surprisingly, the pattern of cutting those who actually create station content while sparing the top tier has negatively impacted the work environment. “The morale inside the newsrooms is devastated, and it’s horrible,” University of Southern California Annenberg journalism professor and industry consultant Robert Hernandez tells Nonprofit Quarterly. “We look at someone at the C-level suite and say, ‘Man, they’re there because they’re the smartest people in the room, they deserve that compensation,’ but I think we’ve hit a turning point. Maybe [it’s] the increase of unions, [but] people are getting more savvy and start[ing] to see that the emperor has no clothes.”
At the heart of these layoffs has been financial challenges to public stations, including listeners moving to, and supporting with donations, an ever-growing number of competitors. “Local and national foundations, a traditional source of support for public media, have spread their funds across other forms of non-profit local news, such as statewide digital news start-ups or news organizations specializing in investigative news, [so] there’s a lot more competition within local news for foundation money,” says Jim Friedlich, CEO and Executive Director of the Lenfest Institute, a Pennsylvania nonprofit seeking ways to sustain local news organizations.
“Non-profits’ membership is down across a number of philanthropic sectors, including public media,” Friedlich adds. “Donors have been tighter with their wallets amidst concerns about the economy and inflation. Adding to the strain, many smaller donors can no longer deduct their memberships from their taxes.”
How can those still in public radio news/talk stations’ corner offices turn things around? “The public media sector needs to move decisively to engage users digitally, to build new and younger audiences at lower cost, and to generate new streams of revenue,” Friedlich says. “These challenges don’t mean that the whole of public media is broken, nor that it cannot return to growth or emerge even stronger.”
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