The impact of NPR cuts; plus, a National Trust update, Tufts journalists and libel fallout in Everett

You may have heard that less than 1% of NPR’s budget comes from the federal government. That figure is sometimes bandied about by those who wonder why the news organization doesn’t just cut the cord and end the debate over taxpayer-funded news. The problem is that it’s more complicated than that.

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In today’s New York Times morning newsletter, media reporter Benjamin Mullin explains the reality. Public radio stations in general are highly dependent on funding from the quasi-governmental Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and those member stations pay a lot for NPR programming.

In rural areas, in particular, public radio is a primary source of news when there is an emergency such as a tornado or flooding. And many of those stations would not survive a cutoff in government funding. Mullin writes:

NPR can weather the funding cut, … thanks in part to aggrieved listeners: Executives predict a sudden boom in donations if Congress defunds it, as listeners rush to defend their favorite programs. But they will likely give more in big-city markets.

Or as former CPB board member Howard Husock has put it: “NPR may receive little direct federal funding, but a good deal of its budget comprises federal funds that flow to it indirectly by federal law.”

Public television, which is more expensive to produce and more dependent on the CPB, would fare worse than radio, Mullin writes.

So as Donald Trump, Elon Musk and Marjorie Taylor Greene prepare to DOGE government funding for public media out of existence, consider what would be lost, especially on the radio side. NPR, one of our most ubiquitous sources of reliable, non-paywalled news, would likely have to offset substantial cuts; and the local part of public radio’s mission would be devastated, with stations closing in rural areas that lack the donor base of large cities.

Not to mention that all of this is grounded in an artificial crisis of Trump’s making. There is no funding shortfall. The public is not calling for an end to public media. What is driving this are our “malefactors of great wealth,” to borrow a wonderful phrase from Theodore Roosevelt, an earlier Republican president.

National Trust update

I’ve written several times recently about the National Trust for Local News, a nonprofit that owns about 65 newspapers in Colorado, Maine and Georgia and that has recently run into some trouble. Co-founder Elizabeth Hansen Shapiro has departed amid cuts as well as complaints about low salaries for journalists while some Trust executives receive six-figure salaries.

Last week Sarah Scire and Sophie Culpepper of Nieman Lab took a deep dive into what’s gone wrong at the Trust. Dr. Hansen Shapiro tells them:

Conservation, as an idea, feels emotionally resonant and important, and for me — and for a lot of us — is why we come to this work. These are precious civic assets. We should not be letting them die on the vine. But the second, more important step, in a lot of ways, is transformation.

One of our biggest learnings has been to not let the “conservation” part of the mission get in the way of pushing hard and fast on transformation when the business requires it.

One interesting observation is offered by former Portland Press Herald executive editor Steve Greenlee, now a journalism professor at Boston University. The philosophy has been to reserve philanthropic dollars for the operation of the Trust itself, leaving its member newspapers to fend for themselves. To which Greenlee asks: “What’s the point of being a nonprofit if you can’t use fundraising to support your core mission?” Good question.

Another question is how healthy these papers were when the Trust acquired them. As Ellen Clegg and I reported in our book, “What Works in Community News,” the 24 weekly and monthly papers that the Trust acquired in Colorado in 2021 (its first transaction) were said to be profitable. The Maine papers, anchored by the Press Herald, have been break-even at best for a long time.

So did the Trust bring management expertise to these papers that will pay off in the long run? Or did it simply impose another layer of bureaucracy? The answer to that will be key to the papers’ future — and to whether the Trust can continue with its important work of saving legacy papers from falling into the clutches of corporate chain ownership.

My standard disclosures: Hansen Shapiro is featured in our book and has been on our podcast; Lisa DeSisto, who left abruptly as CEO of the Maine Trust for Local News late last year, is a professional friend of ours; and we were the guests at a fundraiser for the Maine Trust last October.

Student journalists stand tall

With freedom under assault at colleges and universities, the student press is more important than ever. The Tufts Daily has provided valuable reporting about the arrest of graduate student Rümeysa Öztürk at the hands of black-clad ICE goons, apparently for the crime of helping to write an op-ed.

Now the paper’s managing board has issued a public letter reaffirming its commitment to the First Amendment and to its journalistic mission. The board’s letter says in part:

The Daily has the ability to conduct its work because of the rights enshrined in the First Amendment — rights that not only allow us to publish freely, but also encourage participation in debate, the expression of ideas and the pursuit of truth. It is our core belief that journalism is one of the critical tenets that upholds our democracy.

Significantly, the letter includes the bylines of six board members, all of whom are at the top of the paper’s masthead — the editor-in-chief, the managing editors, the associate editors and the production manager.

Editorials are generally unsigned, as they represent a news organization’s institutional voice. In this case, Tufts’ student journalists clearly believed they needed to take stand, under their own names. Good for them.

Imbroglio in Everett

Michael Casey of The Associated Press has written a fascinating story about Everett Mayor Carlo DeMaria and the aftermath of his libel suit against the Everett Leader Herald. DeMaria won a $1.1 million settlement last December that stipulated the Leader Herald would have to shut down.

As Casey writes, “Almost everything the paper wrote about DeMaria turned out to be fake.” But now DeMaria himself is in trouble, as the city council is demanding that he return payments it claims he was not entitled to. The story adds:

Some residents grumbled about the loss of local news coverage.

“We need all kinds of voices,” said Everett homeowner Peggy Serino, a regular at council meetings. “Just because the administration didn’t agree with something doesn’t mean you shut it down.”

No question that requiring a paper to shut down is an unusual, if not unheard-of, requirement as part of a libel settlement. But Everett, a small, blue-collar city of the sort that sometimes has little news coverage, actually had three independent local news sources. And it still has two — the Everett Advocate and the Everett Independent.