Dear public radio leaders,
The impending loss of all funding to the Corporation For Public Broadcasting will hurt. But it may also be the wake up call needed to get the industry where it should be.
While the CPB grants will hurt, most of the industry can overcome the loss of the funding with more cooperation and a little consolidation. Money can go further with the elimination of overlapping positions and I’m not talking about trimming production or reporting jobs. The cuts and overlaps need to be removed from the C-suite and by streamlining back office functions.
When KQED San Francisco announced earlier this week that it would cut 15% of its staff and still have 312 employees, multiple commenters questioned how a TV and radio station could still have that many when most commercial radio clusters are down to just a handful of employees. Most of that is because commercial radio has learned since consolidation nearly three decades ago to hub many functions such as traffic, music scheduling, production and recently regionalizing engineering. In many large markets there are individual public radio stations each with large teams dedicated to just one function.
If public radio groups could work together to create station production, traffic, pledge support, and other hubs they would be able to save money and be able to allocate more money to local content. In larger markets or more compacted geographical regions like the Northeast, stations could share engineering teams and other resources.
But we can also go further. It’s time to consolidate full operations. Does each public radio group need a full executive branch pulling in a large percentage of revenue? Buffalo, Rochester and Syracuse NY are just a few hours apart on the New York Thruway. Each market has one or more public operators that could combine into one group to share resources as opposed to each having nearly 5% of their annual revenue going to executive compensation. And there are larger markets where multiple organizations can come together in ways that are more productive to enable sustained growth.
With consolidation comes the opportunity for shared marketing, publicity, fund raising, creating digital revenue opportunities, filling news gaps in their regions. Fulfill what was promised when commercial radio consolidation took place or what the NAB thinks further consolidation will produce, but without debt service and having to funnel money back to shareholders. Without consolidation we’re seeing massive cuts at large public media operators anyway.
We need a more sustainable way to build forward. The government has forced action, but this is likely something that needed to happen anyway.
When I read this article, though it wasn’t the particular types of situations you’re mentioning it does call something else to mind. I think of stations like WUKY or WSGE in particular, does there need to be two stations in the same market, running morning addition or all things considered when There’s a full market station running all talk. We have seen both classical and jazz networks cut their feet completely to go to talk, and yet in 2025 we still have stations going halfway on the music discovery, and wasting the other half on something else that people can already get on a better signal.
Public radio and television must realign content to represent the entire mainstream spectrum of American opinion rather than only liberal-oriented philosophy. This realignment would also likely bring in donations and corporate underwriting from those who subscribe to conservative thought.
We do have free speech in the country and public broadcasting is entitled to broadcast liberal viewpoints but NOT with tax payer funding. I argue that, instead, public broadcasting should be allowed to run commercials with calls to action rather than only corporate underwriting which is not supposed to contain calls to action.
The two alternatives are either representing the full spectrum of mainstream public opinion with government funding or staying on the liberal-oriented course with commercials. I completely understand why Congress pulled support for public broadcasting at this juncture.
Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube, and Amazon Music are kicking commercial radio’s ass. Therefore, the idea that public radio should imitate the failed commercial radio model doesn’t make sense. KQED is the top-rated Nielsen station in the Bay Area, ahead of all commercial stations. Their revenue from listener contributions alone exceeds the ad revenue of 95% of commercial radio stations. There are many ways for public radio to overcome this challenge; the last thing they want is to follow the path of repeatedly bankrupt, antiquated commercial radio companies.