Without tax payer funding, what is public media?
This past August marked my two-year anniversary as Executive Director of KALW Public Media in the San Francisco Bay Area. It also marked the beginning of a new era, the post-Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) funding landscape, when the financial floor that many stations rely on no longer exists. In many ways, CPB served as a financial backbone for local public media, and the decision to eliminate federal funding was not just a budget cut: it was a political act aimed at silencing independent journalism and community voices that the current administration perceives as biased.
Overnight, the sector moved from warning signs to lived crisis. Questions about sustainability, equity, collaboration, and power are no longer theoretical. They are immediate and unavoidable.
Public media is at a rare and pivotal moment. The whole system must confront why it exists, who it serves, and what it means to be public. The story of where it is going to go cannot be answered solely in Washington or in boardrooms, and it cannot be answered only by the largest and most resourced stations. The future of public media will be defined by whether this network can evolve into something more distributed, more equitable, and more accountable to the communities we serve.
I have witnessed this kind of reckoning before. In the arts and culture sector after the Great Recession, entire swaths of the field were forced to admit that their business models belonged to a previous era. In the early 2000s, when youth culture, technology, and activism collided, new forms of storytelling and organizing emerged because people were willing to abandon assumptions and build from the ground up. Every meaningful transformation requires reimagining the work itself, not adjusting at the edges.
We are in that moment now.
Two National Public Radios: The Institution and The Idea
In the national conversation about where we go from here, it has become increasingly important to distinguish between National Public Radio the institution in Washington, and National Public Radio the idea. The idea is the network, which includes hundreds of public stations, large and small, urban, rural, and Tribal— most community serving. It is the collective power of local storytelling, local accountability, and local trust.
The institution has its challenges, which is inevitable for any organization under extraordinary pressure. But the idea of National Public Radio has always been larger than any headquarters. The power of the network is the network.
The biggest stations often have complex financial models and accountability to trustees and corporate partners that make risk-taking difficult. These stations matter deeply. Many of us carry their programming, rely on their reporting, and value their talent. Yet caution cannot be the defining strategy for the next phase of public media.
For the smallest stations, the stakes are existential. Many had cuts that exceeded significantly more than half their annual budgets. While there are some short-term solutions happening, like the Public Media Bridge Fund, these are not sustainable and some estimate that more than 80 could close in the next year or two. These are the stations closest to their communities, and if they disappear, entire regions will lose independent media and local reporting altogether. Conversations about consolidation are percolating, but that opens up new challenges as the ethics and value each station brings would often be compromised if not lost entirely if the most financially robust do the absorbing.
Then there are mid-size stations like KALW. We stand somewhere in between. With a six-million-dollar budget, small for our market and mid-to-large nationally, we have the unusual combination of risk tolerance and access to funders, partners, and civic leadership, even if we are not particularly financially robust. But we do have access and that access is not just an advantage. It is a responsibility to act on behalf of the sector, not just ourselves.
This moment, like many moments, speaks to the need for defined leadership unafraid to address the power dynamics in place, and that potentially lie ahead.
While I greatly admire what NPR leadership has done and is doing, we are in a moment where a changed approach to leadership overall within National Public Radio can be transformative. For decades, it has been too easy to treat the network as a hierarchy instead of an ecosystem. In the post-CPB environment, that model is not sustainable. The future must be distributed. It must trust and invest in local leadership, especially in communities and regions that have been historically underfunded or ignored.
Over the past several months I have joined weekly meetings with National Public Radio and station leaders from across the country. While I protect the confidentiality of those discussions, I can say this: the tone is different. Under Katherine Maher’s leadership, it seems that the institution is rebuilding not just financially, but relationally. She is creating space for candid dialogue, shared problem solving, and honest critique. She is bringing in thoughtful people who are doing the hard work of building and rebuilding trust and redesigning the relationship between headquarters and the network.
The institution is shifting. The idea can shift with it, if we engage fully, honestly, and ambitiously. To do so, we have to continue to ask ourselves how we can continually build and rebuild trust with people who have become increasingly skeptical of journalism as they understand it.
From Extraction to Partnership
In 1999, a few of my colleagues and I were invited to run a series of poetry workshops in Mostar, Bosnia for a group of kids in their late teens and early 20s from Bosnia, Serbia, Croatia, and Kosovo. This was part of a post-war youth conference that was going to unite young people from throughout the region through the arts at a big convening in Sarajevo. We had 10 days to train them.
I can not understate how little they wanted anything to do with us at first. To them, recent Western visitors were either soldiers or journalists, and the journalists came with their stories already written. In fact, one teenager told us that she felt that the ones she’d interacted with were there to “steal our stories to tell theirs, then leave when they get what they need.”
But we maintained a fidelity to our practice that grew workshop participation from 10 to over 3 full busloads of kids. People respond to honest requests for them to tell their stories, especially when given the tools to do so well.
That dynamic shows up in our industry too, especially when national media parachutes into rural communities or battleground states during elections or tragedy. There are many shames to this, perhaps especially that there are literally thousands of journalists in those very communities whose work is often ignored or usurped. Like most things that are long-lasting, public media at its best is built with communities, not on top of them.
And so now that we don’t receive federal dollars, we have even more of an opportunity—and maybe even a responsibility—for it to be publicly shaped, publicly accountable, and publicly valued. We must expand who tells the stories, not just who hears them. And to tell those stories we must make the tools—the powerful ones that reflect the best of journalistic practices—widely available. Not just the platform, but the tools and the fidelity to practice. To reflect the full plurality of the United States, we must open up the tools that great journalism is built on. This is not a red-blue divide or an urban-rural divide. It is the complexity and context of lived experience coupled with the rigor or training and mentorship and opportunity.
Public media is civic infrastructure, or at least should be. Done right, it creates pathways for local stories, local journalism, and local culture to move into the public square with depth, dignity, and reach. It connects communities to regional and national conversations and helps people see themselves and each other more clearly.
Stations like ours can experiment, prototype, and model what larger organizations may be too cautious to try. That also is not only an opportunity, it is an obligation. If we treat this moment as transformation rather than decline, public media can emerge stronger, more relevant, and more necessary than ever before.
To do that, we need investment. Not in nostalgia. Not in stabilization. We need investment in experimentation, trust, local authorship, and communities having the support, training, visibility and opportunity in shaping their own narratives to better inform the public. The landscape has changed. So must we. This is the moment we are in.
And there is more story to come. I promise you that.
There is always more story after the story.
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This KALW Speaks essay is part of Upset the Setup, a three-part series from KALW Executive Director James Kass that challenges institutions and audiences to rethink what public media can be, and to boldly imagine a more pluralistic, equitable, and human future.
Learn more about the future of public media: From A Whisper To A Roar.
