As I approach my two-year anniversary as the Executive Director of KALW Public Media in the San Francisco Bay Area, public media is at a rare and pivotal moment. The whole sector has to stop and ask why it exists. I have experienced this before in the arts and culture world, when the Great Recession forced entire swaths of the field to recognize that our financial models were built for another time. I saw it earlier in the 2000s, when youth culture, technology, and activism collided and demanded new forms, new language, and new ways of organizing. In each case, survival meant reimagining the work from the ground up, not just adjusting at the edges.
The biggest stations often have complex financial models and accountability to trustees and corporate partners that don’t allow for too much risktaking. While I value those stations and carry many of their programs, I too often see caution in their emerging strategies and public statements at precisely the moment when courage is most needed.
For the smallest stations, especially those in rural and Tribal communities, the stakes are existential. They are closer to their communities than most, yet more exposed to every structural weakness in the system. Many face cuts exceeding half their annual budgets. Some estimate that more than 80 rural and Tribal stations will close in the next year. Without a profound rethinking of what public media is, these communities will have no public media at all.
With a six-million-dollar budget (small in our market but mid-to-large nationally) we have both the willingness to take risks and the access to funders and partners many stations our size do not. That access is not just a gift; it is a responsibility to act on behalf of the sector, not just KALW.
Over the past several months, I have joined weekly meetings with NPR and station leaders from across the country. I have promised to keep what is said in these conversations private. What I can say is that these meetings have been a lifeline in a time of upheaval.
However, two years ago, in my first meeting of this kind, NPR hosted a conversation on collaboration where their people were the only ones speaking. While that has shifted under Katherine Maher, the legacy remains: large stations receive the most resources and the most attention, even as recent national campaigns highlight the smallest and most precarious as the most representative of the system.
The distance between power and precarity in this field is not just unjust, it is unsustainable. Those of us with connections and resources have to help close it. We need to radically expand who gets to tell the stories that define us, and where those stories come from. We need more national stories from places like Kentucky and Oregon that do not simply illustrate prewritten narratives from Washington or New York but create new ones.
I learned this lesson a long time ago. In 1999, I ran poetry workshops in Mostar, Bosnia, during a post-war youth conference. The young people there from Bosnia, Serbia, Croatia, and Kosovo, wanted nothing to do with us at first. To them, Western visitors meant one of two things: soldiers or journalists. And the journalists came with their stories already written. As one teenager put it, “They stole our stories to tell theirs, then left when they got what they needed.”
That dynamic hasn’t gone away. It lives in how national media often parachutes into rural towns or red states only during elections, disasters, or violence. I’m not the first to say this, but we cannot keep extracting stories from communities and calling that service. We cannot keep casting the rest of the country as supporting characters in a coastal script
The loss of federal funding has stripped away any illusion of stability. We have to decide now if our goals are to restore what was, or reimagine what it can be.. Public media can no longer just mean federally funded. It must mean publicly accountable. Publicly shaped. Publicly valued. It must mean serving not just audiences but communities. It must mean expanding who tells the stories, not just who hears them.
For public media to be truly public, it needs to reflect the true plurality of the United States. This is not a red-blue divide, an urban-rural divide, an education divide, or any other single factor — it is about the fullness of people’s lives. People want to be seen and heard in the media, in all their complexity and context, on their own terms, without assumptions or prewritten narratives. Life in Kentucky or Oregon, to continue those examples, cannot be fully captured by people who grew up there, went on to Ivy League schools, and moved to New York or DC. People across the country need to tell their own stories, illuminating what it means to live in the places they call home.
Public media is civic infrastructure. Done right, it creates pathways for stories, information, and culture to move from local communities into the public square with the reach and authority of journalism, without losing depth or dignity. It connects local truths to regional and national conversations and strengthens our ability to see ourselves and each other clearly.
Stations like KALW can experiment, test ideas, and model approaches larger systems may be too cautious to try. That is not just an opportunity, it is an obligation. If we treat this as a moment of transformation rather than decline, we can build a public media that is more relevant, more trusted, and more necessary than ever.
But to build, we need investment — not in nostalgia, not in stabilization, but in experimentation, in local authorship, and in trust that independent media matters. The landscape has changed. But there is more story to come. There is always more story after the story.
—
This piece was brought to you by KALW Speaks, a monthly series of essays from KALW staff and contributors, exploring the ideas that drive our work. Each of these essays reflect our commitment to innovation and invites you into a deeper conversation about the future of public media.
Learn more: From A Whisper To A Roar.
