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.
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.”
At a time when public trust in every major institution except local public libraries is below 50%, local television news has some advantages that other forms of media lack.
According to survey data that Geiger presented, local television news is trusted by about 41% of the public — lower than in previous years, but far ahead of the 29% who say they trust national television news. Ironically, he added that social media is the most used platform for news even though it is the least trusted.
“Usually if you don’t trust something, you don’t use it. But that’s not how this functions. That may feel like a woe-the-republic moment for you,” he said, observing that social media is the top go-to for news among every age group except those between 55 and 64. (Presumably that would hold true for those older than 64 as well, but that demographic was not included in his charts.)
“The path back to trust is going to happen at the local level,” Geiger said, adding that local television news is “the most important news institution in the country.”
Geiger was joined by Keren Henderson, an associate professor at Syracuse University, who presented some highlights from the latest “State of Local TV News” survey from the Radio Television Digital News Association, better known as RTDNA.
At a time when goals such as diversity in the work force are under fire from the Trump administration, Henderson’s data showed local TV news continues to lag. Currently, she said, about 42% of the U.S. population comprises minorities, which far exceeds the 28% minority percentage working for local television news. Some 77% of stations reported employing staffers who are LGBTQ, but when they were specifically asked about transgender staff, that percentage fell to about 18% — a decline from about 23% in 2024.
Currently there are 1,117 stations across the country airing local TV news, of which 695 are producing original programming with the rest being repeaters. That figure is essentially unchanged from 2024. In addition, she said threats to news workers were up 50%, leading to a decline in the use of solo multimedia journalists being assigned to go out and report stories.
Interestingly, the digital platforms that local TV newscasts have embraced the most are Instagram (91%) and YouTube (85%), with the much-hyped TikTok app lagging at 39%. Bluesky and Threads barely registered.
The average starting salary in local TV news was just a little more than $39,000. Not surprisingly, Henderson said, 80% of those leaving the field reported low pay as the main reason. Another 64% cited work-life balance and 52% cited burnout.
Overall, it was a rather dispiriting presentation, which led graduate student Lisa Thalhamer, who moderated the session, to end by asking Geiger and Henderson what makes them hopeful.
Henderson cited her teenage children, who are engaged and paying attention to the news — what she referred to as “that level of energy of caring about the world.”
Geiger said he’s hopeful that engaging more with the audience and helping them to understand how journalism works could offset the overall decline, with “facts being the building blocks.” He added: “There is a mechanism to do that.”
On the latest “What Works” podcast, I talk with Marta Hill, an extraordinary young journalist who I got to know during her time at Northeastern.
Marta is currently a graduate student in the Science, Health and Environmental Reporting program at New York University, where she’s also the editor-in-chief of Scienceline. In that role, she works with her peers at NYU to produce what she describes as “an accessible, down-to-earth science publication.” Marta is originally from Minneapolis, which makes it almost a tragedy that my co-host, Ellen Clegg, a fellow transplant from the Twin Cities, couldn’t be with us. (Ellen will be back for our next podcast).
At Northeastern, Marta served in various capacities at The Huntington News, an independent student newspaper, including a one-year stint as editor-in-chief. She was also in my media ethics and diversity class in the fall of 2023. Whenever I teach ethics, a week gets devoted to talking about the harassment that journalists face both online and in real life. It’s a problem that’s been getting worse in recent years, and it’s something that young reporters in particular really have to think about before deciding whether to go into journalism full-time.
Marta decided she wanted to explore the issue of harassment and student journalism more deeply in the form of an honors project, and I was her adviser. She wrote a wide-ranging reported article, and a shorter version of that article was recently published by Nieman Reports, part of the Nieman Foundation at Harvard. Her article, titled “J-schools Must Better Prepare Students for Handling Harassment,” lays out some concrete steps that journalism educators can take so that their students are not caught off guard when they encounter harassment at their student news outlet or on the job.
My Quick Take is on a nonprofit initiative to bring more and better news to Tulsa, Oklahoma, a thriving metro area with nearly 700,000 people in the city and surrounding county. The area is currently served by the Tulsa World, a daily paper that’s part of the Lee Enterprises chain, which, like most corporate newspaper owners, has a reputation for aggressive cost-cutting. The new nonprofit, the Tulsa News Initiative, is built around a venerable Black newspaper, but there’s more to it than that.
William Harlan Hale delivering the first Voice of America Broadcast on Jan. 1, 1942. Photo via Wikipedia.
When a coup takes place in other countries, we sometimes learn that news programming is taken off the air and replaced with patriotic music. I don’t know what kind of music has been playing on Voice of America since Saturday morning. What I do know is that dictators like Viktor Orbán, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping found it pleasing to their ears.
There is a danger at moments like this to breeze past stories such as the virtual shutdown of Voice of America because we knew it was coming anyway, and because there are more immediate matters with which to grapple, including illegal arrests and deportations. But the Trump White House’s shutdown of Voice of America, though not surprising, is nevertheless a moment worth paying careful attention to as the authoritarian regime headed by Donald Trump tightens its grip.
Something I stress with my journalism students is the importance of having your own home on the internet, either in the form of a newsletter or a blog, so that you have a repository for your work.
But you’ll notice I didn’t say “permanent” repository. Probably the two most widely used platforms, Medium and Substack, are owned by corporate entities that could disappear or change their terms in various onerous ways.
For Media Nation I use WordPress software with a hosting service, GoDaddy, which at least in theory is a safer bet. But something could go wrong with WordPress so that there would no longer be anyone to provide critical security updates. Or GoDaddy could Go Out of Business. The Internet Archive is invaluable, but it doesn’t scrape everything. The bottom line is that you have to stay on top of things if you want to keep the tumbleweeds from blowing into your digital homestead.
Which is why I was interested to read this interview with Brandon Tauszik, a fellow with the Starling Lab for Data Integrity at Stanford, who is involved in designing low-cost ways for journalists to preserve their work.
Mike Beaudet on a student reporting trip to Peru that he helped lead in 2024.
On the latest “What Works” podcast, Ellen Clegg and I talk with Mike Beaudet, longtime investigative reporter for WCVB-TV (Channel 5) in Boston and a multimedia professor at Northeastern University’s School of Journalism.
Mike has won many awards for his hard-hitting investigations and runs a project aimed at reinventing television news. On March 21-22, he’ll lead a conference at Northeastern called “Reinvent: A Video Innovation Summit.” Mike’s students are producing content for everything from Instagram and YouTube to TikTok. As he explains, local television news, still among the most trusted and popular forms of journalism, must transition from linear TV in order to reach younger audiences who’d prefer to watch video on their phones.
I’ve got a Quick Take about the National Trust for Local News. Co-founder Elizabeth Hansen Shapiro exited the nonprofit suddenly last month. That came amid reports that the Portland Press Herald and other papers that the Trust owns in the state of Maine might soon announce budget cuts.
(Cuts were announced at the Maine papers after this podcast was recorded. Although the newsrooms were spared, Aidan Ryan of The Boston Globe reports that 49 employees will lose their jobs and that print will be pared back significantly in favor of digital.)
Now comes more bad news. Colorado Community Media, a group of 24 weekly and monthly papers in the Denver suburbs, is closing two papers and is losing money, writes Corey Hutchins in his newsletter, Inside the News in Colorado. Those papers were the National Trust’s first acquisitions in 2021. The Trust’s mission is to buy papers that are in danger of falling into the clutches of corporate chain ownership. It’s a worthy goal, but the Trust has obviously hit some significant obstacles.
Ellen has a Quick Take noting that Harvard University is shutting down Harvard Public Health, the digital home to stellar longform journalism about public health. At a time when the very facts of science are challenged on social media every day, this is disheartening news.
Former Washington Post (and Boston Globe) top editor Marty Baron, left, with his old Globe colleague Matt Carroll, now a journalism professor at Northeastern University. Photo (cc) 2024 by Dan Kennedy.
It’s been nearly a week since Jeff Bezos issued his edict that The Washington Post’s opinion section would henceforth be devoted exclusively to “personal liberties and free markets,” and it’s still not clear what that is going to mean in practice.
Many observers, including me, have assumed that Bezos was using coded language — that, in fact, what he meant was that the Post would go all-in on Trumpism. That would seem logical given his earlier order to kill an endorsement of Kamala Harris and his overall sucking up to Donald Trump.
So far, though, not much has happened other than the resignation of opinion editor David Shipley. Liberal opinion journalists like Eugene Robinson, Ruth Marcus and Perry Bacon Jr. are still there. Another liberal, Dana Milbank, responded to Bezos’ edict by tweaking the owner (gift link), writing:
If we as a newspaper, and we as a country, are to defend Bezos’s twin pillars, then we must redouble our fight against the single greatest threat to “personal liberties and free markets” in the United States today: President Donald Trump.
Given that Bezos’ agenda has yet to be clearly articulated, let me suggest another possibility: rather than Trumpism, he intends to embrace libertarianism, which was thought to be his guiding political philosophy before he bought the Post in 2013.
Mike Rosenberg with a cartoon by local sports artist Dave Olsen. 2018 photo by Julie McCay Turner is used with permission.
One of the best parts of writing about local-news startups is the opportunity to go out on stories with reporters to observe how they do their jobs. And so it was that on a midsummer day in 2021, I accompanied Mike Rosenberg of The Bedford Citizen as he toured the town’s new cultural district.
Mike, then 72, was the first paid staff reporter since the Citizen’s founding as a volunteer project nine years earlier. He died on Monday while he was covering a basketball game at Bedford High School, according to an account by the site’s managing editor, Wayne Braverman.
I’d like to share with you what I wrote about Mike in “What Works in Community News,” by Ellen Clegg and me. He was a colorful character, deeply devoted to his town and to the Jewish community, with a strong sense of ethics and fair play. My condolences to Mike’s family, the folks at the Citizen and all of those he touched over the years.
***
Mike Rosenberg was walking along the Narrow Gauge Rail Trail, a dirt path that takes its name from the type of train that used to chug through the area. On this hot July morning in 2021, Rosenberg was reporting on the new cultural district in Bedford, Massachusetts, an affluent suburb about 20 miles northwest of Boston. Leading the way were Alyssa Sandoval, the town’s housing and economic development director, and Barbara Purchia, chair of the Bedford Cultural Council. The town’s planning director, Tony Fields, joined the group about halfway through the tour.
A couple of cyclists rode by. “Hi, Mike,” said one of them. Rosenberg returned the greeting and then said to no one in particular: “I have no idea who that is.”
From left, Josh Stearns, Kara Meyberg Guzman and Joe Kriesberg
If you are a local nonprofit news publisher, editor, reporter, board member or donor, please mark this on your calendar: On Thursday, April 3, our What Works project will sponsor a free webinar titled “The Ethics of Nonprofit News: What Board Members and Donors Need to Know.” Issues will include conflicts of interest and understanding the boundaries between the news and fundraising sides of a community journalism organization.
• Josh Stearns, managing director of programs at the Democracy Fund, a longtime activist on issues related to media reform and equitable journalism. Stearns was most recently senior director of the Public Square Program at the Democracy Fund, where he led its journalism and technology grantmaking. He was previously director of journalism sustainability at the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation and, before that, press freedom director at Free Press. He currently serves on the board of Honolulu Civil Beat and the Democratizing Philanthropy Project and was a co-founder of the Freedom of the Press Foundation and First Draft News.
• Kara Meyberg Guzman, CEO and founder of Santa Cruz Local, a nonprofit news organization in California focused on communities not otherwise served by local media. Her passion is producing fair, accurate, reliable news that’s free and accessible to all residents, including those who will never be able to pay for it. She is also a board member of the Tiny News Collective, whose mission is to make journalism entrepreneurship more accessible, equitable and inclusive.
• Joe Kriesberg, CEO of the Massachusetts Institution for a New Commonwealth, or MassINC, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization dedicated to making Massachusetts a place of inclusive economic opportunity and civic vitality. In that capacity Kriesberg serves as publisher of CommonWealth Beacon, MassINC’s digital publication covering state politics and public policy. Kriesberg has decades of experience in nonprofit management and in working with news organizations.
I’ll be moderating the panel. I’m a professor in Northeastern’s School of Journalism and the co-author, with Ellen Clegg, of the book “What Works in Community News: Media Startups, News Deserts, and the Future of the Fourth Estate” (Beacon Press, 2024). Ellen and I also host a podcast and website on the future of local news, part of the School of Journalism, at whatworks.news.
The Associated Press has been in the news a lot lately, both because of its feud with the White House over Donald Trump’s insistence that it refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America” and for some cuts it’s had to implement (see Gintautus Dumcius’ story in CommonWealth Beacon and Aidan Ryan’s in The Boston Globe).
But here’s some good news: The AP announced on Thursday that it’s creating a Local Investigative Reporting Program to support efforts at the community level. According to an annoucement by executive editor Julie Pace, the initiative will be headed by veteran AP editor Ron Nixon, who “will work with state and local outlets to cultivate stories and support their investigative reporting needs.”
The program will encompass training, resources and access to AP services, and will build on the agency’s Local News Success Team “to localize national stories for member audiences and provide services and support to newsrooms across the U.S.”
