Seattle’s Cascade PBS blamed federal cuts for layoffs, introduced final week, that may 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 important a part of the information ecosystem. They supply essential information and data and have to be supported. However the quantity of unique, native reporting they do varies extensively 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 sooner or later.
When that occurs, and Congress considers restoring public broadcasters’ funding, I counsel they use that chance to deal with the general decline of native information.
A resurrected Company for Public Broadcasting would possibly revise its group service grant program, to encourage or direct recipients to provide extra native information and public affairs protection.
By then America’s want for native journalism can be even higher. Newspapers, which give most civic protection, are closing at a charge of greater than two per week and greater than half of U.S. counties have little to no remaining protection.
Tv information is dealing with 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 traders to personal extra stations in an area market, or mix two networks underneath a single proprietor.
Consolidation will additional cut back unique reporting. Consumers will reduce prices to pay debt, and it’s cheaper to make use of materials shared throughout networks.
That might create a chance for public broadcasters in the event that they had been inclined and weren’t hobbled by federal cuts.
Cascade tried. Now it’s extra prone to pursue partnerships with native media shops than considerably enhance its personal reporting, Rob Dunlop, its president and CEO, advised me final week.
“I do suppose that the native information organizations are going to wish to search out methods through which we work extra intently collectively with a purpose 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 method by that however that is 2026 and without end, 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. “Once 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 purpose to right-size itself for the lengthy haul.”
Collaboration is going on throughout native information as shops attempt to do extra with much less.
This may be fruitful. However it’s a step again from the strategy a decade in the past, when Cascade was amongst a handful of public stations rising native protection by buying native shops, largely digital startups. Some noticed this as a possible answer to the unfold of reports deserts.
These mergers started in 2013, based on a report by Harvard’s Shorenstein Middle, and peaked when Chicago NPR affiliate WBEZ acquired the Chicago Solar-Instances 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 business.
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 must do and actually pressured by the Trump cuts,” Essex Porter, a former KIRO journalist on Cascade’s board, advised me.
The result is very 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 persona pushed.”
Seattle would have misplaced Crosscut both method. Earlier than the merger it struggled as a industrial enterprise, switched to a nonprofit and “by no means actually had the flexibility 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 an alternative of writing tales for Cascade’s web site, its newsroom will largely produce 90-second and five-minute information segments, Dunlop mentioned. They are going to air in gaps between nationwide exhibits on KCTS 9, doubtless extra often, and submit on YouTube and social media. Cascade will even proceed its native historical past, meals and humanities exhibits.
Cascade would have stored the bigger newsroom “if we had been in a position to help it financially,” Porter mentioned. However the station nonetheless would have “continued to search out methods to additionally current a number of the journalism in shorter types.”
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 facet sort of received out.”
