Seattle’s Cascade PBS blamed federal cuts for layoffs, introduced final week, that can finish its foray into written native information protection.
However its hybrid newsroom, fashioned by the 2015 acquisition of on-line information startup Crosscut, was already transferring towards extra short-form video earlier than President Donald Trump and Congress swung their ax at public broadcasters.
Regardless of some nice work the merger by no means appeared to totally gel. Native information remained sparse on Cascade’s major channel, KCTS 9, and its on-line information website by no means drew large readership.
Now the layoffs are driving the final nail into Crosscut’s coffin. They add to questions on how a lot public broadcasters can exchange the lack of in-depth, native reporting that newspapers traditionally offered.
Public broadcasters are a vital a part of the information ecosystem. They supply essential information and knowledge and have to be supported. However the quantity of authentic, native reporting they do varies broadly and now they’ve misplaced $1.1 billion in federal funding by 2027.
I’m attempting to be hopeful that the federal authorities will return to supporting a free and unbiased press in some unspecified time in the future.
When that occurs, and Congress considers restoring public broadcasters’ funding, I recommend they use that chance to deal with the general decline of native information.
A resurrected Company for Public Broadcasting may revise its neighborhood service grant program, to encourage or direct recipients to supply extra native information and public affairs protection.
By then America’s want for native journalism will likely be even higher. Newspapers, which offer most civic protection, are closing at a price of greater than two per week and greater than half of U.S. counties have little to no remaining protection.
Tv information is going through an imminent wave of consolidation. CBS, CNN and scores of native stations are in play. Media moguls are kowtowing and Kimmeling to grease the skids.
On Tuesday the Federal Communications Fee will contemplate stress-free limits on possession of native stations and main TV networks. It may enable buyers to personal extra stations in a neighborhood market, or mix two networks underneath a single proprietor.
Consolidation will additional cut back authentic reporting. Patrons will minimize prices to pay debt, and it’s cheaper to make use of materials shared throughout networks.
That would create a chance for public broadcasters in the event that they have been inclined and weren’t hobbled by federal cuts.
Cascade tried. Now it’s extra prone to pursue partnerships with native media retailers than considerably enhance its personal reporting, Rob Dunlop, its president and CEO, informed me final week.
“I do suppose that the native information organizations are going to want to search out methods during which we work extra carefully collectively with a view to present higher, broader protection of native tales,” he mentioned.
Dunlop mentioned Cascade’s monetary hit is extra than simply $3.5 million in federal {dollars} misplaced in fiscal 2026.
“We’d handle our means by that however that is 2026 and ceaselessly, when you think about now that we’ve received to consider a gap that’s $7 million over two years and $17.5 million over 5 years and $35 million over 10 years,” he mentioned. “While you begin to consider the horizon of this type of loss, it actually does problem the group to consider what it must do with a view to right-size itself for the lengthy haul.”
Collaboration is going on throughout native information as retailers attempt to do extra with much less.
This may be fruitful. But it surely’s a step again from the method a decade in the past, when Cascade was amongst a handful of public stations rising native protection by buying native retailers, principally digital startups. Some noticed this as a possible resolution to the unfold of stories deserts.
These mergers started in 2013, in line with a report by Harvard’s Shorenstein Heart, and peaked when Chicago NPR affiliate WBEZ acquired the Chicago Solar-Occasions newspaper in 2022.
Whereas this introduced new strengths to the organizations and resulted in some nice journalism, it’s now clear that public broadcasters aren’t immune from the income and viewers losses pummeling the information trade.
Cascade could also be an outlier by quitting long-form journalism however its peers are all in flux as they lose funding.
“It’s definitely a wrenching factor to should do and actually compelled by the Trump cuts,” Essex Porter, a former KIRO journalist on Cascade’s board, informed me.
The end result is particularly painful for David Brewster, the previous Seattle Weekly writer who based Crosscut.
“To their credit score, they actually did consider within the journey when it was nonetheless Crosscut they usually invested in that,” he mentioned. “However … they misplaced religion in that they usually whittled it down and it grew to become largely characteristic information and character pushed.”
Seattle would have misplaced Crosscut both means. Earlier than the merger it struggled as a industrial enterprise, switched to a nonprofit and “by no means actually had the power to fund actual information gathering and to pay a lot for these reporters,” Brewster mentioned.
KCTS rebranded as Cascade PBS and initially poured assets into the local-news challenge. However a collection of cuts and reorganizations concluded on this week’s choice to put off 19 newsroom staffers and rent three multimedia specialists.
As a substitute of writing tales for Cascade’s web site, its newsroom will principally produce 90-second and five-minute information segments, Dunlop mentioned. They’ll air in gaps between nationwide exhibits on KCTS 9, probably extra incessantly, and publish on YouTube and social media. Cascade can even proceed its native historical past, meals and humanities exhibits.
Cascade would have saved the bigger newsroom “if we have been capable of assist it financially,” Porter mentioned. However the station nonetheless would have “continued to search out methods to additionally current among the journalism in shorter varieties.”
Brewster was extra blunt.
“It was at all times an ungainly marriage of Crosscut and a tv station,” he mentioned. “And as I suspected, ultimately the tv aspect sort of received out.”
