Cuts at WBUR underscore the black swan event that now threatens public radio

There are many reasons that can be cited for the crisis in which much of the news media finds itself. Essentially, though, journalism is attempting to adjust to two massive black swan events.

The first was the rise of the internet, which destroyed much of the business model for newspapers and magazines by transferring the vast majority of advertising revenues to Craigslist, Google, Facebook and Amazon. Yes, some publications have survived and even thrived by persuading their readers to pick up the costs in the form of digital subscriptions. But we are a long way from the days when ads accounted for 80% of a typical newspaper’s income.

The second is playing out right now: the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, which is devastating public radio, our most important source of free news. Even as newspaper paywalls have excluded those who either can’t afford or don’t wish to pay, NPR and its network of local public radio stations have remained free to all. Now a dramatic change in listening patterns is threatening all that.

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That threat hit Boston big-time on Wednesday, as WBUR announced it was cutting 31 employees, 24 through a voluntary buyout and seven through layoffs. According to Aidan Ryan of The Boston Globe, the cuts amount to 14% of the station’s staff and will save the station $4 million. WBUR reporter Todd Wallack, in the station’s own story on downsizing, writes that the cuts will “help offset a steep decline in on-air sponsorships, also known as underwriting.”

“We didn’t have a choice financially,” WBUR chief executive Margaret Low was quoted as saying. “We ultimately need to make as much money as we’re spending.” Wallack added that other costs will be trimmed as well.

WBUR’s news competitor, GBH, is also facing financial challenges and may soon announce its own round of layoffs, the Globe reported last month. And those local problems come in the midst of a national challenge that has hit station after station as well as NPR itself.

In The New York Times, Benjamin Mullin and Jeremy W. Peters report that NPR has been dealing with a massive slippage in audience in recent years. Here is the heart of their story:

NPR’s traditional broadcast audience, still the bulk of its listenership, is in long-term decline that accelerated when the pandemic interrupted long car commutes for millions of people. The network has begun to sign up digital subscribers who pay for ad-free podcasts, but that business has lagged far behind that of its competitors.

While NPR still has an audience of about 42 million who listen every week, many of them digitally, that is down from an estimated 60 million in 2020, according to an internal March audience report, a faster falloff than for broadcast radio, which is also in a long-term decline.

That’s a drop of 30% in listenership since just before COVID. Given that many people are now working in person three days a week rather than five, that drop correlates pretty directly with the change in driving habits. NPR has tried to offset the decline with podcasts, but where do people listen to podcasts? For many, it’s in their cars. In any case, there’s little money in podcasts except for a few at the very top. The rise of podcasts has also exacerbated tensions between NPR and its member stations, since the network can distribute them directly without relying on the stations. More than anything, fewer listeners means fewer donors.

One interesting tidbit in the Times story relates to former senior business editor Uri Berliner’s error-filled screed about NPR’s shift to the progressive left — a shift he attributed in part to the network’s embrace of various diversity initiatives. As Mullin and Peters write, NPR was seeking to diversify its on-air talent not just because it was the right thing to do but because top executives were desperately seeking to expand their audience beyond affluent, aging white suburbanites. For the most part, they say, it hasn’t worked:

NPR’s leaders redoubled their efforts to diversify their audience and work force and closely tracked metrics for each. They added podcasts aimed at people of color and younger listeners. They promoted people of color to high-profile reporting and hosting jobs. All of these moves were meant to ensure the nation’s public radio network would remain competitive as the country’s population continued to grow more diverse.

So it came as a disappointment to some people on NPR’s board last fall when they were presented with new internal data showing their efforts hadn’t moved the needle much with Black and Hispanic podcast listeners.

As with newspaper executives trying to adjust to the internet era, public radio leaders have made plenty of mistakes along the way, and the Times story includes a number of bone-headed moves. Few, though, rival what’s taking place at WAMU in Washington, D.C., which earlier this year closed its DCist local website and has been beset by turmoil ever since.

Andrew Beaujon, writing for Washingtonian, recently posted a wild story of what’s taking place inside WAMU, leading off with a killer anecdote: the legendary Diane Rehm’s apparently having her mic cut when she dared to speak up at an internal staff meeting with general manager Erika Pulley-Hayes. Beaujon includes this exchange:

“What I did not understand,” Rehm said during the March 6 meeting, “was the layoff of a fine reporter like Jacob Fenston or the director of technology, Rob Bertrand, or James Coates —”

“Diane,” Pulley-Hayes interrupted.

“— who just two years ago won a prestigious award here at the university,” Rehm continued. “And so it would have seemed that you sort of publicized that you were taking down DCist. But you did not talk much about the other — that other staff members who were losing their jobs. It’s as though they just disappeared because somebody didn’t want them here anymore —”

Multiple staffers say that at this point they saw Rehm’s mouth moving, but she produced no sound. Rehm declined to comment for this article, but she told other staffers that she did not mute herself.

“Diane, thanks for your feedback,” Pulley-Hayes said, as the 50-plus-year veteran of public broadcasting appeared to continue to try to speak. “But it’s really inappropriate to talk about HR decisions in a public forum. So I’m not at liberty to address it in this forum, to talk to you. You’re asking HR questions that I cannot answer.” Pulley-Hayes then called on another employee.

“Diane Rehm is a legend,” one WAMU staffer tells Washingtonian. “We were all shocked.”

Critics like Uri Berliner would have us believe that public radio is suffering because of liberal bias, but that’s based on the dubious premise that there is some large bloc of conservative listeners who’ve stopped listening, or that underwriters suddenly were offended by what they heard. There is no evidence for either proposition. Rather, this is a business problem, and it’s not at all clear what the solution is going to be.

Just as newspapers have found there was nothing quite like the glory days of monopoly print, public radio executives are discovering that they benefited at one time from a unique set of circumstances that no longer exists — an era when broadcast radio was the audio format of choice; when commuters were stuck in the cars five days each week; and when deregulation led to the decline of commercial radio as stations were scooped up by corporate chains that destroyed what made them unique.

Finding a way to solve those challenges is not going to be easy.

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