I keep coming back to one question as public media figures out what comes after the Corporation for Public Broadcasting: Who is actually incentivized to do something simply because it is good for the public?
Not because it generates revenue. Not because a foundation has made it a funding priority. Not because it builds an audience that can be converted into members. Not because there is a business model waiting on the other side.
Simply because people need it.
That, at its core, was part of what CPB was charged with making possible. We can debate how well the public media system fulfilled that promise, and we should. But CPB represented a public policy decision that some things were worth supporting even when the market could not, or would not, pay for them.
I worry that we are moving too quickly into a conversation about how public media replaces the money without spending enough time on what happens to that idea.
Because the problem we are trying to solve is much bigger than a hole in public media’s balance sheet.
The market was never going to do all of this
There is an economic term for part of what we are experiencing: market failure.
We have watched the commercial model for local journalism deteriorate for years. Newspapers have closed or dramatically contracted. Local reporters have disappeared. Advertising moved elsewhere. News organizations consolidated. In many communities, there are simply fewer people being paid to pay attention.
This is particularly consequential in rural communities, Tribal communities, low-income communities and places with relatively small populations. These are places where the economics of providing local news and information were difficult long before the current crisis in journalism.
And this is important: market failure does not require bad actors. Markets respond to incentives. If it costs more to cover a community than the revenue that coverage can reasonably generate, there is not much of a commercial incentive to provide that service.
But the community’s need for information does not disappear because the business model does. Someone still needs to sit through the school board meeting and tell people what happened. Someone needs to explain why the hospital is closing, where the cooling center is, what the ballot measure actually does, whether the wildfire is moving closer or why everyone’s property taxes just changed. Sometimes that information needs to reach 2,000 people instead of two million.
That does not make it less important. This is part of why public media exists in the first place. There are things we need as communities and as a democracy that the market is simply not designed to provide consistently.
But this is not only market failure anymore
What makes this moment different is that public media is increasingly being asked to respond to two failures at once.
There is market failure in commercial media, particularly around local journalism and civic information. And now there is government failure in maintaining the public infrastructure that was supposed to help fill some of those gaps.
The federal government stepped away from CPB, but the need CPB was created to address did not disappear with the appropriation.
People still need trustworthy, fact-based information. They still need emergency information. They still need to understand what their local governments are doing. Communities still need places where their stories, cultures and experiences are reflected back to them.
For many of the community radio stations NFCB works with, particularly in rural and Tribal communities, this is not an abstract policy conversation. A station may be one of only a handful of locally rooted institutions distributing information across a large geographic area.
When one of those stations loses capacity, we should be careful about assuming someone else will step in. Sometimes the alternative to a small newsroom is not a better-funded newsroom. It is no newsroom at all.
Sometimes the alternative to community radio is not another local information provider. There may simply be less local information. That should concern us well beyond public media.
What CPB actually subsidized
CPB was not perfect. Neither is public media.
I have spent enough time inside this system to know that we should not romanticize it. Public media can be bureaucratic, slow to change and too attached to institutions and structures simply because they have existed for a long time.
But we can acknowledge all of that and still recognize something important about what CPB did.
CPB subsidized public value. It created space for a different question to be asked.
Does the public need this?
That question is different from asking whether something can generate revenue, attract enough donors, grow an audience or fit into a foundation’s strategy.
All of those questions matter. I run a nonprofit. I understand that payroll has to be made and budgets have to balance. Mission does not exempt any of us from math.
But there is a difference between asking whether an organization can financially sustain an activity and asking whether a community needs that activity to exist.
That distinction is becoming increasingly important.
Everyone has an incentive
Philanthropy is going to be enormously important in whatever comes next for public media and local journalism. There is extraordinary work happening because foundations and individual donors have decided that local information, journalism and civic connection matter.
But philanthropy has incentives too. Foundations have strategies, priorities, grant cycles and theories of change. Leadership changes. Strategies change. Initiatives begin and end.
Commercial investment expects a return. Membership depends in part on a community’s ability to give. State and local funding can provide important new resources, but those programs depend on political choices that vary dramatically from state to state and can change with an election or a budget cycle.
None of these funding sources is bad. We are going to need all of them.
But they are not the same thing as a society making a collective decision that some things should exist because they create public value. That is the piece I worry we are losing.
We are also asking public media to do more
At exactly the moment when the federal commitment to public broadcasting has disappeared, expectations for public media seem to be growing.
We want public media to help rebuild local journalism and address news deserts. We want stations to provide emergency communications, counter misinformation with fact-based reporting, strengthen civic participation, serve rural and multilingual communities, preserve local culture, support education and rebuild trust.
These are worthy expectations. I believe deeply in much of this work. But notice what we are doing.
We are asking public media to help solve the consequences of market failure in commercial journalism and government failure in supporting information infrastructure, while simultaneously telling public media organizations that they need to become more financially sustainable.
I spend a lot of time thinking about sustainability, and increasingly I think we need to be more precise about what we mean when we use that word.
If sustainability means more underwriting and sponsorship, communities and audiences with greater commercial value will have an advantage. If it means membership, communities with more disposable income will have an advantage. If it means philanthropy, organizations whose work aligns with current philanthropic priorities will have an advantage.
And if the answer is simply that public media needs to become more entrepreneurial, then we should say clearly what that means. We are asking public-service organizations to become better at generating private revenue so that they can continue producing public goods. That may be part of the answer. It cannot be the whole answer.
We cannot solve market failure by recreating it
This is where I think the next public media conversation needs to go.
If public media responds to the loss of CPB primarily by chasing the audiences easiest to monetize, competing harder for philanthropy and concentrating resources in communities where fundraising is easiest, we may succeed in preserving some very strong organizations.
But we will also begin recreating the same market failures public media was supposed to help correct.
The places that are expensive to serve will remain expensive to serve. Small communities will remain economically unattractive. Organizations serving communities with less wealth will have fewer options. Journalism whose civic value exceeds its commercial value will continue to be difficult to sustain.
This is why I do not think the next chapter can only be about organizational sustainability.
It has to be about public purpose.
And that requires being willing to separate two questions we often treat as though they are the same: Does this particular institution need to survive? And does the public good this institution provides need to survive?
Those are not always the same answer.
Some public media organizations will need to change. Some should collaborate more deeply. Some may consolidate. Some services may be better provided through entirely different structures than the ones we have inherited. I am not interested in arguing that every institution should continue forever simply because it has always existed.
I am interested in making sure we do not confuse changing an institution with abandoning the public need it was created to serve.
So who pays for the public good?
As new funds, intermediaries, journalism initiatives and civic media efforts emerge, I think we should ask a very basic question before we start designing the programs:
What public good are we trying to preserve, and who is responsible for making sure it exists?
That question should shape philanthropy; and state news, information & journalism policy. It should be part of the emerging civic media conversation. And public media itself needs to wrestle with it as organizations make increasingly difficult choices about what they can and cannot continue doing.
Because we could spend the next several years replacing pieces of CPB’s funding and still fail to replace the thing that mattered most about it.
We could save organizations and lose the public good.
Fact-based information is a public good. Local accountability journalism is a public good. Emergency information is a public good. Cultural expression and connection are public goods. Making sure people in small, rural, Tribal, low-income and other communities that the commercial market does not adequately serve have access to those things is also a public good.
CPB was one imperfect American answer to a difficult question: What information and cultural infrastructure does a democracy need even when there is no sufficient private return for providing it?
For more than half a century, we had a piece of national infrastructure built around the recognition that markets cannot answer that question alone. Now we don’t.
So I am less interested in asking what replaces CPB than I am in asking what replaces that commitment. Because if the answer is that every organization, every newsroom and every community simply has to find its own sustainable business model, then we haven’t solved the problem CPB was created to address.
We have handed it back to the market.
