Zeroed out

Congress has wiped out federal funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, meaning public radio and television stations across the country will now have to evaluate how, or whether, they can make up the funding from listeners or other donors.

The funding cuts, requested by President Trump, mean that NPR, PBS and their member stations will lose $1.1 billion that had been appropriated for the next two years. The cuts are expected to “weigh most heavily on smaller public media outlets away from big cities,” the AP’s Mark Thiessen and David Bauder report, and it is likely that some will not survive.

The vulnerability of rural stations is reflected in a New York Times analysis of the stations most at risk.

Public television stations across the country will now be “forced to make hard decisions in the weeks and months ahead,” PBS president and CEO Paula Kerger said after the Senate voted on the bill Thursday.

One example: Shari Lamke, general manager of Pioneer PBS in Granite Falls, Minn., told Minnesota Public Radio that CPB funds account for a major chunk of its budget. “It’s kind of hard to plan for a third of your budget going away, but that’s kind of what we’ve been doing,” she said.

Katherine Maher, NPR’s president and CEO, told NBC News that as many as 80 NPR stations could “go dark” in light of the cuts.

“Local journalists are going to be the first who are at risk,” she said.

News In Focus
Headlines, resources and events aligned with API’s four areas of focus.

Civic Discourse & Democracy

>> Supreme Court news coverage has talked a lot more about politics ever since the 2016 death of Scalia and GOP blocking of Obama’s proposed nominee (The Conversation) 

Two political scientists studied Supreme Court coverage in five major newspapers from 1980 to 2023 and found that politics “has a much stronger presence in articles today than in years past.” The change was especially notable beginning in 2016, the year Justice Antonin Scalia died. The resulting vacancy changed everything, write Joshua Boston from Bowling Green State University and Christopher Krewson from Brigham Young University. Now, they say, “it would be nearly impossible to read contemporary articles about the Supreme Court without getting the impression that it is just as political as Congress and the presidency.”

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Culture & Inclusion

>> Freelancing with ADHD: How to embrace your strengths and manage challenges (Association of Health Care Journalists)

In doing a story about elite athletes with ADHD, Anna Medaris writes, she came to learn that the diagnosis “looked alarmingly just like me.” She shares what she’s learned about ADHD and freelance writing, including “how to lean into your strengths and manage the career-related challenges.” Her tips include advice about how to choose your assignments, manipulate your environment, and give yourself grace, among others.

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Community Engagement & Trust

>> New from API: Partnering with community members isn’t just about trust in news — it shows local civic health belongs to all of us

Across the country, news organizations are finding ways to partner with their communities. Many are moving toward a collaborative model where the local information landscape is shaped with, not just for, the community. With this ethos as our guide, API’s Local News Summit in October will focus on inclusion, belonging and local leadership. We’ll talk about how news leaders have an opportunity to identify and create more on-ramps for community members to become journalists or contribute to local civic health in other ways.

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Revenue & Resilience

>> Local reporters live ‘pipe dream,’ founding worker-owned news outlet (San Francisco Examiner) 

A group of 11 journalists in the San Francisco Bay Area have founded the Coyote Media Collective, a journalist-owned digital newsroom in which all the founders will share equal stakes and be compensated at the same rate, writes Keith Menconi. The group’s journalism will be in the “subversive style of the Bay Area’s alternative weekly newspapers, known for offering irreverent perspectives, wry commentary, and thorough arts and culture coverage,” Menconi writes. The founders say their funding efforts are encouraging so far.

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What else you need to know

💸 Press Forward invests $22.7 million in local news infrastructure to meet the urgent challenges newsrooms face (Press Forward)

📝 What is NOTUS? Young reporters in a “teaching hospital for journalism” learn from DC veterans (Poynter)

🤳I blew up on TikTok with journalism — here’s how you can, too (International Journalists’ Network)

💲Reach in the US: 70-strong team is turning a profit with more growth planned (Press Gazette)

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Weekend reads

+ What went wrong at the Houston Landing? (Nieman Lab)

+ Listen: New Capital B Atlanta editor embraces community impact as journalism faces ‘unprecedented attacks’ (WABE)

+ A juicy chronicle of the fat decades at Condé Nast (The New York Times)

+ AI is polluting truth in journalism. Here’s how to disrupt the misinformation feedback loop. (Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists)