Losing public funding won't kill public media: Ignoring the audience problem will

VP of Sun-Sentinel.com Tom Davidson

DIANE FITZPATRICK

It’s one thing to ask, ‘How can we preserve public funding?’ It’s quite different to ask, ‘What can we do to earn it?’”

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

The Trump Administration is gunning to zero out the budget for public media — proposing to eliminate funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Given Republican majorities in Congress, this is the most serious threat in at least a generation to $535 million in annual federal funding to public media.

Across the system, station leaders are reviving FAQ pages, taping social-media videos extolling our virtues and showing the sort of strategic focus rarely seen in our ecosystem.

But this is not the worst of the threats facing us. And saving federal funding won’t do anything to fix the existential crisis we face with our audiences.

Before some of you have a stroke: This is not to downplay the seriousness of the threats. Federal funding (primarily through Community Service Grants) accounts for roughly 15% of all the money in the ecosystem. Losing 15% of anything hurts. And the pain will be particularly concentrated in smaller stations whose Community Service Grants tend to make up a higher portion of their budget. Organizations that receive state support (think university and state-network licensees) could face a double whammy as those institutions also consider spending cuts.

But would that loss kill the system? And more to the point: Let's say 12 months from now, the threat is magically gone. Are our other problems solved? Not even close.

We’ll still need to tackle the existential threats of steep declines in broadcast usage, the inexorable shift to on-demand digital media, the rise of nearly infinite competitive voices and our appalling lack of skills in engaging and fundraising from digital audiences.

So, organizations should absolutely fight back against the proposed funding elimination.

Board members should be calling their representatives and senators. In every public appearance, station leaders should emphasize that public media gets less than $2 per year per American — less than what NASA pays SpaceX for two round trips to the International Space Station, to pick but one semi-random example. The national associations — especially America’s Public Television Stations (APTS) and National Public Radio (NPR) — should continue to emphasize the high trust placed in us by the public.

But if that’s all we do in 2025, shame on us. The best way to ensure our financial future is to deliver powerful value back to our communities — to become so essential to their lives that cutting us off would be absurd.

Many organizations do this brilliantly via rich local content, deep community partnerships and outreach, live events, and identifying and promoting the young digital content creators in every community.

However, too many stations simply serve as passthrough distributors for national content. That model was the only way to distribute content in the 1970s. Today, that model is dated — honestly irrelevant. Most consumers can access what they want whenever and wherever they desire.

I’ll encourage all of us in public media to reframe the question. It’s one thing to ask, “How can we preserve public funding?” It’s quite different to ask, “What can we do to earn it?”

Some updates on previous columns:

Last November, I wrote about “The best conference you didn’t attend” — the Local Independent Online News publishers’ Independent News Sustainability Summit. It’s a wealth of ideas focused on topics we in public media execute poorly — particularly engagement, audience development and fundraising for and from digital audiences.

LION has scheduled its 2025 edition of the conference for Sept. 3-5 in St. Louis. You should attend.

Last September, I wrote about the intriguing California news cooperative shepherded by KQED and powered by technology from Distributed Media Lab. In essence, it allows California publishers to share curated content with minimal manual effort — exposing their work to new groups to build top-of-the-funnel audiences.

That California project continues to grow. It’s now up to 28 members, and its content modules were seen 4 million times in a recent month. And DML has continued to expand those partnerships — many of which include nonprofit or public-media entities.

But most interesting to me is its efforts to bundle subscriptions or donations into those news partnerships. The Minnesota Star Tribune now offers its content-sharing partners the ability to bundle subscriptions together — repeating both the cash and the data from the partnership.

This project bears watching and could point the way for expanded digital fundraising efforts for local and regional public media collaborations.

Tom Davidson is a professor of practice in media entrepreneurship at the Bellisario School 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.