By Jacqueline Munis and Nicholas Bass, NABJ Monitor
When the Corporation for Public Broadcasting announced it was shutting down last Friday, Mark Rosenberger wasn’t shocked or panicked.
“While I was disappointed in the news, I wasn’t surprised by it,” said Rosenberger, the chief content officer at Ideastream, which owns Cleveland’s NPR and PBS affiliates.
The move to close the decades-old nonprofit was a long time coming as the Trump administration and Republican lawmakers set their sights on public media. This isn’t the first time politicians have tried to cut funding for public media, but “this time felt different,” Rosenberger said.
Congress rescinded $1.1 billion in previously allocated funds for CPB, leaving stations in the lurch for up to millions of dollars in some cases. Now stations in Ohio and across the country are trying to find a path forward in the face of funding cuts and are looking to listeners and new fundraising strategies.
Ohio is home to over 15 public radio and television stations, which received $13.3 million in funding from CPB in 2024, including three radio and five television stations in Cleveland, all owned by Ideastream.
Rosenberger emphasized that the cuts do not change the stations’ commitments to their audiences across news, arts or music coverage.
“Disruption creates opportunity,” he said. “Oftentimes when people find themselves in the middle of some disruption, it’s usually followed by great opportunities for innovation, for adaptation, and creates new areas of opportunity.
“The entire public media system will have to find a way forward,” he added, “given our interdependence not only in content and programming, but also technical and digital infrastructure.”
WOSU, the NPR affiliate in Columbus, serves the state’s largest market and will lose $2 million in funding.
“While we assess the full impact, we remain focused on our mission and are working closely with our national and [Ohio State] university partners to advocate for future support and long-term sustainability,” George Davis III, the director of marketing and communication at WOSU said in a statement. “We know the media landscape has changed, and we’ve had to adapt—balancing the need for funding with our mission to serve the public. As such, we are exploring a range of strategies to ensure WOSU remains strong.”
In western Ohio, Cincinnati Public Radio froze salaries of their 42 full-time employees and limited travel and professional development after they lost $485,000 from the CPB.
Richard Eiswerth, the president, general manager and CEO of Cincinnati Public Radio, said that through this fiscal year, the station does not plan major changes.
“We will do our best to maintain the broad scope of programming, cultural news and other educational offerings that we have traditionally provided,” Eiswerth said. “We are relatively confident we will be able to sustain current staffing at least through the remainder of this fiscal year.”
Eiswerth raised concerns about the satellite interconnection system that CPB underwrites that is essential for transmitting broadcasts.
Juliet Fromholt, the music director at WYSO, which serves rural, suburban and urban communities around Dayton and the Miami Valley, also expressed uncertainty about the future of music on public radio stations because CPB has paid for music licensing for many stations for decades. WYSO has about 70,000 listeners and broadcasts original music and news programming alongside syndicating programs from national outlets like NPR and American Public Media.
About 10% of WYSO’s funding came from CPB, which was already budgeted in this fiscal year, starting in June. Now they are pivoting to more fundraising and hope to double the 10% of their listeners who donate to make up for the $300,000 gap.
“As much as losing the funding is devastating — it won’t be this case in every community — but for communities like ours that can rally that local support, it becomes an even stronger bond between the public service that we’re providing that manifests locally and the people that we are serving,” Fromholt said.
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