Morale Sinks At Public Radio Newsrooms

From coast to coast, stations have been announcing layoffs virtually nonstop: 10 percent of the workforce at NPR and 12 percent at Sacramento’s Capitol Public Radio last year; 15 staffers at WAMU in Washington, DC, in February; 15 at Colorado Public Radio in March; 14 at Chicago Public Radio in April; as many as 25 at KQED in the Bay Area in May; 14 percent of staff WBUR and 31 staff members at WGBH, both in Boston, this spring.

These layoffs have left dedicated frontline journalists dazed and hurting and looking for work, according to NonProfit Quarterly.

The layoffs are also having a profound impact on the journalists left behind at the stations and on the struggling American journalism industry as a whole.

“The morale inside the newsrooms is devastated and it’s horrible,” said Robert Hernandez, a professor of professional practice of journalism at the University of Southern California (USC), Annenberg. “I am teaching students and mentoring and doing consulting in industry. I see that impact…and when these folks with these incredible skills go to other industries they get paid a lot more. They are valued more.”

But public radio stations are facing steep financial challenges. Their audiences, in particular, are dwindling as the nonprofit and journalism sectors struggle with declining membership and donations in an ever-fragmenting media landscape.

“Public media’s problems parallel those of legacy media more generally—a secular shift to digital platforms plus a cyclical decline in advertising and user revenue,” says Jim Friedlich, CEO and executive director of the Lenfest Institute, a Pennsylvania nonprofit that’s searching for ways to sustain local news organizations. “These challenges don’t mean that the whole of public media is broken, nor that it cannot return to growth or emerge even stronger. To do so, however the public media sector needs to move decisively to engage users digitally, to build new and younger audiences at lower cost, and to generate new streams of revenue, all much easier said than done.”