The Public Media Mergers Playbook
Building and Dismantling for a New Public Service Media
Can public media help fix market failures in local news? That was our question 18 months ago when we launched the Public Media Mergers Project. Supported by a partnership between the Public Media Venture Group and the Google News Initiative, and housed at the Shorenstein Center for Media, Politics and Public Policy, the initiative explored a rising trend in mergers between traditional public broadcasters and local digital newsrooms across the country.
Our answer: Public media can absolutely help fix market failures in local news, but it will take a simultaneous process of building on its traditional values and dismantling the legacy structures of the current system to create a new local journalism service worthy of “the public” in public media.
To reach this conclusion, we studied and worked with fifteen newsrooms joining together inside eight public broadcasters, serving communities in New York; New Jersey; Pennsylvania; Washington, D.C.; Missouri; Colorado; Washington State; and California.
Out of that research, we are launching the Public Media Mergers Playbook. The Playbook is designed to guide public media stations and independent local digital newsrooms through the process of first considering and then managing a newsroom acquisition and merger.
While you can find a detailed summary of our key research takeaways here, I want to use this space to highlight our findings, then contextualize our guidance amid the transformational movements toward greater diversity, equity, and inclusion in public media that we’ve seen inspired by the events of 2020.
What Can a Public Media Newsroom Merger Accomplish?
We saw across the stations we studied that bringing on a digital news site with a strong brand and editorial voice created a significant boost in the quantity and quality of local public service journalism the stations produced. We found evidence that newsroom mergers can be a catalyst for much sought-after cultural transformation inside public media — though successful acquisitions require patience, resources, leadership, vision, and, oftentimes, staff turnover.
These merger strategies are ultimately allowing traditional public broadcasting institutions to reach new audiences with a deeper level of public service journalism. As Sandra Clark, vice president for News and Civic Dialogue at WHYY, which now is home to Billy Penn, explained to us, “The most generic way of looking at it to me is, how do we serve the public? How do we make ourselves more accessible and responsive, and reach beyond the traditional audience?”
A public media newsroom merger likewise offers significant benefits for independent digital news sites in desperate need of financial sustainability, new resources for their journalism, and a path to scale beyond their core audience through multi-platform reach. John Mooney, a founder of NJSpotlight and now executive director of NJSpotlight News at NJTV, believes these mergers can point the way to the future for many small digital newsrooms:
“I think public media could be the scaffold for a lot of local and state news operations. They bring so much. And they bring stability — that is the biggest thing. For 10 years, we were not stable. We were a start-up. Now we are not a start-up anymore. And that is a big deal.”
Building and Dismantling for a New Public Service
The hypothesis of the Public Media Merger project was that reimagining and recreating existing public broadcasting institutions represents an important step in a new direction for local journalism. The process and the findings of this study provide strong evidence that combining public media stations and local digital newsrooms can indeed create a new, strong foundation for noncommercial local journalism.
But this foundation is just that — a foundation.
The construction of a new local journalism service, which we witnessed in our public media cohort, is accompanied by an equally important dismantling. After the data collection for this study closed, the death of George Floyd ignited the spark of widespread, renewed protests for social justice. We convened a series of closed discussions in the summer and fall among the Mergers cohort about the ways their newsrooms were processing and responding to the intense waves of anger, sadness, and mobilization in the movements for racial justice.
We observed across the group a resolve in leadership at every level to deepen their commitment to expressing the values of diversity, equity, and inclusion in all aspects of their culture, operations, and journalism. But this has meant grappling with the deep-seated cultural biases and inequitable practices of public media.
The national reckoning around racial justice landed on this sector in a particularly painful and resonant way. For stations that regularly track their Nielsen ratings, there is no denying that the audiences that are served by and support public media over the air are predominantly white and affluent. The voices on air in radio are mostly white too. This is a legacy of systemic racism writ broadly, refracted through public media’s membership-based business model, the sound and sensibility of its mostly white, Baby Boomer founding generation (on the radio side), and the logic of broadcast as a mass medium.
Thus the failure of existing public media organizations to live up to these ideals is not new, and calls for change are not new either. My own historical research has revealed that debates about who defines “the public” in public radio go back decades. Marginalized voices in broadcasting have been agitating for change for almost as long as the Act has been in existence. The failure in public media is not in values or mission, but in leadership and implementation.
The hardest conversations in public media right now are about the disconnects between leadership and staff; values and action; culture and strategy; and good intentions and systemic — not to mention, personally experienced — unjust results. All of these structures are up for review and recreation by people who care about the institution inside and out.
Part of the promise of digital-native newsroom acquisitions into public media, both radio and television, is to open up new models, formats, and platforms that can serve diverse as well as niche audiences. Public media newsroom mergers are one possible path to building a more diverse, equitable, and inclusive local public service. The stations that participated in our study were not, however, immune to leadership departures, newsroom shakeups, and public accounting during this process.
The most forward-thinking stations in the cohort (and the most forward-thinking leaders in the system) are acknowledging failures and moving in the direction of addressing the structural roots of inequalities in the current system.
For example, cohort member Victor Hernandez, the executive editor of Crosscut at Cascade Public Media in Washington State, has been talking with his newsroom about this dismantling and building process as “opening up the tributaries” for new talent, new stories, and new ways of working to transform the legacy institution. For Hernandez, the importance of adopting a comprehensive approach to addressing equity and inclusion in the newsroom was “not about doing diversity for diversity’s sake.”
As he shared with his team during their comprehensive DEI planning process, “We will not solve these issues by simply a few timely hires for diversity’s sake and not changing the system for developing, hiring and retaining journalists of color. A single hire only grants access to a club that everybody should’ve had access to in the first place. And that’s on us for not changing the tributaries. Further, it places people of color in a very awkward position because now they feel a responsibility to represent. That creates unfair pressures and tensions for them. Access is not equity. We have an opportunity with [what we’re doing] to address change at systemic levels.”
The changes taking shape in the newsroom and beyond at Cascade are sweeping and ambitious. Hernandez has generously shared their learning so far for others here on our blog.
In many ways, public media is well-equipped to take on the task of transformational institutional change. Public media newsrooms — should they choose to take up the task — have at their disposal an institutional mission, purpose, and set of values that can guide them toward transforming their internal structures and fostering a deeper level of community service, supported by more nuanced understandings of “the audience,” “local service,” and “the public.”
And the good news is that all members of the public media community — workers, managers, leaders, boards, contributing members, and viewers and listeners like you and me — have access to the tools that can help transform this system. The values of public service and the mandates of the Public Broadcasting Act are institutional resources to which other media ecosystems cannot lay such direct claim.
These resources must be used wisely, with humility, integrity, and in good faith. The mandate of the Act should be reassessed and reanimated as the needs of communities change, so we can hold our institutions accountable to the values of public service to which they aspire. If the conversations we heard among the cohort this summer are an indication, that work is well underway.
The Next Era of Public Media
There is no doubt that the pressures and trials of 2020 have both accelerated the building and dismantling processes, and given them new urgency. The data collection for the study closed in the spring of 2020, just as the Covid-19 pandemic was hitting with full force. What has been so exciting to see in the months since are the ways in which these newly-merged public media institutions have deepened their abilities to serve their communities with timely, important, and even life-saving information. The new kind of service journalism being delivered has been remarkable to witness — and the painful and necessary internal conversations about how to truly embody the values of public service humbling to observe.
All of this gives me hope that a renewed, more diverse, equitable, and inclusive public media can be built, in part, with the talent, resources, and platforms of the current system. That work is not easy. It’s a simultaneous building and dismantling that requires skilled and thoughtful leadership at all levels — but the possibilities are there, and the future is already present in bits and pieces. The newsrooms in the Public Media Mergers cohort are creating the core elements of a new public media. That’s something to celebrate.
