NPR executives are scanning the horizon for storm clouds even as they are planning a stand-pat budget for the upcoming fiscal year: they don't yet know how badly NPR local member stations have been hurt by the July vote by Congress to cease all federal funding for public media.
NPR CEO Katherine Maher told the board of directors in an open session Friday that the network's $300 million annual budget would be balanced. Like that of the federal government, NPR's fiscal year begins Oct. 1.
At NPR and many member stations, listener contributions have spiked up significantly. They are helping to make up for the cuts, at least in the short term.
But the dynamics are so volatile that officials privately say it's hard to know where the public radio system's finances will land, or how long that generosity will last.
NPR News spoke to seven people with direct knowledge of events for this story. They spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak about internal network matters.
So NPR has not yet revealed its larger strategy or much detail about the budget that addresses the new financial circumstances. NPR officials declined several requests to comment for this story. Maher and her leadership team are holding an all-staff meeting with employees Wednesday.
According to three of the people with direct knowledge, NPR plans to make trims totaling more than $5 million over the course of the coming fiscal year to bring its annual budget into balance. It does not plan layoffs or major programming shifts.
Public radio stations seek more help
Maher is offering $8 million in relief to stations hardest hit by the cost of paying for NPR's programs. She says that figure has not required cuts; NPR appears to have anticipated giving that level of relief and is already doing so this year, according to testimony from a top network official in its lawsuit against the Trump administration.
Some local NPR station officials say their applications have been received and processed promptly. Many, however, argue they will need more help from the network. A tracker set up by a public radio consultant has identified 332 layoffs in public media since July 18, when the Republican-led Congress, at President Trump's urging, defunded public media.
As first reported by Ben Mullin of the New York Times, an association of two dozen NPR and PBS stations in Florida wrote to Maher and the NPR board asking for greater relief and more transparency around NPR's efforts to raise more money.
"Simply put, the fee relief plan NPR has proposed is not sufficient to keep many NPR programs on the air in much of Florida," the association's members wrote. "We understand NPR plans to revisit the fee model for [fiscal year 2027], but none of us can wait that long. The state and federal funding cuts are already impacting us, and we are making decisions now about our... budgets and program schedules."
In June, Florida eliminated nearly $6 million in state funding for NPR and PBS stations.
NPR has invested funds and effort in new collaborative reporting endeavors allowing stations to coordinate their efforts. It has emphasized efforts to raise money in ways that would share donations locally. And it has sought new revenues as well.
NPR Music has placed an experimental "donate now" button on Tiny Desk Concerts, including last Friday's session with Ed Sheeran. (Funds are to be shared with local stations.) And on Tuesday, NPR named Sonali Mehta - a who got her start in the music business at YouTube - as NPR Music's Executive Director.
At WNIN Tri-State Public Media, owner of a small public radio and television station based in Evansville, Indiana, officials were confronted by the loss of state funding from the Indiana legislature in April even before Congress made its move. Donors responded swiftly, doubling the level of contributions received from April to August compared to the same period in the previous year.
That hasn't completely covered the station's combined loss of $1.5 million from federal and state coffers - but it has kept the station from having to tap its rainy day fund so far. Instead, WNIN president and CEO Tim Black announced Tuesday it is cutting five positions, or about a fifth of his workforce.
Black says NPR and PBS made "generous" reductions in the cost to the station to run their programs; other public radio syndicators, including those behind This American Life and Hidden Brain, offered to waive costs for the upcoming year to continue broadcasting their shows.
"We were never going to get away from our core PBS and NPR shows," Black says. "The fee reductions helped to cement that decision."
Three stations pull back from NPR network
The public radio network currently has 244 member stations. That figure is down by two from last year, as stations in Alabama, Oregon and Florida have dropped their affiliation with NPR, while one in Baltimore has signed up.
The number of stations that may shutter could reach 70 to 80, according to Maher and outside consultants.
Outgoing NPR board chairperson Jennifer Ferro said that people interested in public media trust it deeply, even at a time when trust in major institutions, including the media, has hit all-time lows.
"This is going to require us to work differently," Ferro said at an open session of Friday's board meeting, "to trade in an old business model, for new collaborations, shared services, and a new way for us to do what we're here to do - which is to serve our communities."
Ferro also delivered a vote of support for Maher.
"She believes in the power of our system, and she knows that for NPR to succeed, stations must succeed," Ferro said.
The NPR member station in Huntsville, Ala., announced last week it would drop its affiliation with the network and stop broadcasting its shows on Oct 1. WLRH, which is formatted as a classical music station when it is not airing major shows from NPR, said it would devote more resources to local programming.
"WLRH staff will be working together to get back to the station's roots of focusing more on our long-standing existing local programs, as well as developing new programming to better reflect our community," the station said in an announcement. "The WLRH audience will hear more local news, arts, culture, classical music and music of all genres, and original storytelling."
Stations in coastal Oregon and in Panama City, Florida are also dropping their affiliation with NPR.
Such moves are not all in one direction: NPR's executive in charge of station relations informed the board at an open session Friday that classical station WBJC in Baltimore owned by a community college would affiliate with NPR.
Yet the closures are hard to predict.
After the finance committee of Penn State University's board of directors declined to transfer the public radio station it owns to WHYY in Philadelphia, the university decided to shut it down by the end of next June. The transfer proposal included a plan to pay $17 million over five years to help WHYY absorb the costs. Trustees cited the loss of federal funding in making the decision to shut down WPSU.
CPB and NPR financial relationship about to end
The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which Congress set up more than a half-century ago to distribute federal money to public television and radio stations, is to effectively shut down on Sept. 30. A bare-bones staff will remain for several months to wind it down.
Until now, PBS (like local PBS stations) has typically received about 15% of revenues from federal sources. PBS has lost money for educational projects for children from the U.S. Education Department as well as its CPB funding; PBS officials announced earlier this month it was cutting 15% of its jobs.
NPR received far less money directly from the federal government – about 1 to 2% of its budget in a typical year.
CPB last year committed to award NPR a $1.96 million grant toward a new initiative designed to assure fairness in the network's coverage and to bolster public trust after a veteran editor accused NPR of ideological bias. That claim had helped fuel a public outcry and a clamor among Congressional Republicans to kill taxpayer funding for the network's programs.
According to the CPB, it has so far paid just $550,000 – or a bit more than a quarter of the promised amount. It says it is working to fulfill payments on the editorial review and other contractual obligations.
The initiative includes a new editorial review desk in which senior editors scrutinize almost all NPR news coverage before it is broadcasted, streamed or posted. NPR is hoping to receive the money in CPB's waning days but unsure if it will.
Disclosure: This story was written and reported by NPR Media Correspondent David Folkenflik. It was edited by Deputy Business Editor Emily Kopp and Managing Editor Gerry Holmes. Under NPR's protocol for covering itself, no news executive or corporate official reviewed the story before it was posted publicly.
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