Public Radio and Broadcast TV Aren’t (Yet) the Answer to the Local News Problem
Recent scholarship offers cautions about leaning on these platforms.
Welcome to Second Rough Draft, a newsletter about journalism in our time, how it (often its business) is evolving, and the challenges it faces.
As the breadth of the crisis in local news has become increasingly clear, and as responses such as the rise of new digital nonprofits make progress but also leave considerable gaps, people are increasingly casting about for large-scale alternative solutions. This week I want to offer a few words of caution about two of those—public radio and local television. My texts for this sermon are two recent academic offerings that shed important light.
There is less than you may think to local public radio
Prof. Thomas Patterson of Harvard’s Kennedy School and its Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy (where I serve on the advisory board) recently published an important study on local public radio stations’ news efforts. It can be read (and seems to have been intended) as a call for much greater investment in local news on public radio, and that would be fine by me. But I took away from it a very sobering impression of where we stand today.
Patterson’s data is impressive in breadth and depth. He surveyed the assets and perspective of executives at more than 200 public radio stations. What did he find? Most stations “lack the news gathering capacity to be a substantial source of daily news and public affairs information.”
Many of us, when we think of local public radio, may have images of the quite significant reporting operations at a few of the larger stations, such as those in Los Angeles, Chicago and Boston. But Patterson establishes that these are exceptions, not the rule. In fact, just 13% of stations—fewer than one in seven, and only about 25 in the whole country—consider themselves the leading outlet in terms of news coverage in their locale. It seems a pretty safe assumption that neutral observers would place those numbers even lower. And, of course, the problem is most acute in the smaller cities and rural areas where the crisis of local news is most advanced and the peril greatest.
The median size of these newsrooms—nationally-- is just 6-10 people, and the average total station budget below $2 million (with the median likely much lower), of which around 30% is devoted to news. Some of them do lots of great original local programming on the air and online; many do not.
Patterson points out, as many of us have observed with frustration, that most local stations have been slow in their digital transformation over the last two decades, and that they generally remain far too radio-centric, even in the face of much greater consumer choice, particularly when people are in their cars (a key venue for all radio)— and especially in the wake of the reduced commuting rates during the pandemic and since then. The stations themselves more or less admit this: fewer than one third claim that their own digital efforts have had a substantial impact on the quantity or quality of news they deliver.
Well, you might say, this all describes an opportunity, especially as nonprofit funding for local news may be about to grow markedly. Perhaps. But only about half of stations say they could be their area’s leading local news outlet even with substantial new funding—again likely an overcount. The study also asked if stations believe they have the capacity to raise significantly more money. They largely said they do not, and “this problem is most acute in the communities most affected by the decline of the local newspaper,” that is, where the money is needed most. (You can find something of a counterpoint to all of this here.)
Local TV news remains mostly stuck on crime and weather
Some people, having observed the failure of most public radio stations to rise to the occasion of the local news crisis, have recently begun to place increasing hopes on local commercial television news. Before they get too enthusiastic about that notion, they ought to read News Hole: The Demise of Local Journalism and Political Engagement, by professors Danny Hayes and Jennifer Lawless, which just won the Shorenstein Center’s Goldsmith Book Prize for academic books.
Hayes and Lawless did their own study, in this case of 31 TV stations. Unfortunately, they found that local TV hasn’t risen to the occasion either: “There is no evidence of a consistent uptick in coverage of local government.” Specifically, as local newspapers retreated, the authors saw local TV advance in three markets (but with the quantity of coverage there growing only in single digit percentages), while coverage decreased in four markets and one showed no change. Overall, they observed, “local TV news is popular not because of its public affairs content, but because consumers like its staples: crime and weather.” Again, to be sure, there are outstanding exceptions.
Even more concerning, News Hole suggests that TV news may simply not be a great way to inform viewers about civic affairs. The authors’ study, for example, found that residents who regularly read the local newspaper were 11% more likely to be able to name their school superintendent than non-readers. But regular viewer of local TV news were actually one percent less likely to be able to do so than non-viewers.
I’m not opposed to trying to reverse these unhappy realities, but I am against ignoring them while investing scarce philanthropic dollars. The significant existing distribution for both local public radio and local broadcast television— TV remains the top source for local news— make them tempting grantees. Yet there needs to be greater recognition than I believe there is today that any investment in either local public radio or local TV will need to be aimed not just at scaling efforts already underway but also at fundamentally transforming them along the way.
Now WJCT News 89.9 is a mid-market public radio station that had a small news staff (7 including our daily public affairs talk show) and is the kind of station Prof. Patterson’s study (which we participated in, BTW) identified as the majorty: not the leading news outlet in our market, and with a total local news budget under $1m.
I do not disagree that most public radio station have been “slow in their digital transormation.” But in Jacksonville we have been focused on making up for lost time, and created a separate operation and brand (Jacksonville Today) which is not just “digital first” but “digital only.” We freed our Jax Today team from our legacy tech stack (including the CMS provided by NPR that nearly all public radio stations use, but which is limiting) and legacy broadcast-oriented culture and have focused our attention outwards, to the world of digital first journalism outlets including both for-profit and non-profit, rather than into what can be the insular world of public media.
The results at Jacksonville Today are encouraging. More than $2m in “seed funding” raised, most of it locally - in a medium sized southern market not nearly as hospitable to public radio as our northern peer cities. A circulation for our hand-crafted daily news email (15K+) which now rivals the total circulation of our daily newspaper of record, the Florida Times-Union, and continues to grow nicely. A “reader revenue” campaign last November / December which saw more than 500 contributors - more than half of them had no giving history with the public radio station. Sponsorship, which is priced competitively, is now sold-out. These are all modest numbers in larger markets, but they are meaningful here. And the journalism has been important: large numbers of people using - and telling us they appreciate - Jax today voters guides (we have mayor and city council elections happening), and many other examples of coverage with impact.
It’s not that we’ve got this all figured out, far from it. We will still be dependent on philanthropic support - especially if we want to increase our reporting capabilities - for some time. We have a long way to go.
But we have been able to move down this Jacksonville Today road more quickly because we had a base of news operations and infrastructure underneath the new CMS, CRM, digital marketing tools and new reporting and editing capabilities that we've built alongside. In looking at the potential of the public radio world to become a more meaningful part of the solution to the local news crisis, the example of WJCT and Jacksonville Today should not be ignored.
In 2004, I was a struggling freelance public radio reporter, scraping together a living selling different versions of the same story to as many places as I could. My biggest client was a very ambitious local NPR affiliate with a signal where I live but no office. At the time, they did not archive anything online and refused to do so out of a fear it would cannibalize listenership. So I started a podcast website in 2005 to experiment.
In 2023, I look back at a digital career that includes working for a nonprofit start-up as well as creating a product I believe competes with public radio as well as the daily newspaper. But I don't want to compete. I want to collaborate. I deliberately produce a weekly list of what's coming up in local government so other reporters can pick up assignments. That's especially true of television. Here's a direct quote from a news director who also is one of my paid subscribers on Substack:
"We really appreciate your coverage – it helps inform our decision making – and together bolsters the kind of community coverage that can really matter."
That is why I do what I do. Thank you for this post. One day I'll figure out how to turn what I do into a business. Corporate management will never have direct access to my talents ever again.