How To Keep Your Radio Station Going When the Government's Checks Don't Come
The Senate just voted to cut off the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. What comes next?
It finally happened: After decades of putting on a show of threatening to pull public broadcasting's federal funds, the Republican Party changed its mindset and decided to actually do it. The rescissions package that the Senate approved in the wee hours of Thursday morning will claw back the money that Congress allocated to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB). The House still needs to approve the revised bill by midnight Friday, but that feels like a foregone conclusion.
In the past this would be someone's cue to bring up the fate of poor little Elmo, but these days Sesame Street has a home on Netflix anyway. And PBS and NPR themselves are sure to survive this cut. (Remember that huge endowment that Joan B. Kroc left to NPR 22 years ago? Last I heard, the network hadn't even touched the principal.) Much of the debate about the bill has therefore focused on individual stations that receive CPB subsidies.
So suppose you work at a noncommercial radio station and you suddenly have a hole in your budget. Maybe you'll try to fill that gap with an emergency fundraiser—but even if that's a smashing success, you can't count on your listeners to stay in crisis mode forever. If you've been relying on the government's money and the government isn't sending you those checks anymore, you'll need to find a way to keep yourself afloat, and that might mean changing your approach to broadcasting.
There are, broadly speaking, two ways to try to get by without federal support. One is to become much more commercial, and the other is to become much less commercial.
The "much more commercial" strategy is easier to envision because it's what most public broadcasters have been doing for years already. An underwriting announcement is basically a more genteel advertisement, and those boomer-music marathons on PBS are as brazen a case of chasing an affluent demographic as anything on network TV. So one path would be to lean into this approach and air more of the programming that brings in the most dollars.
This strategy has its limits, some of them imposed by law. Suppose there's a kombucha company that's pretty sure its target market listens to a lot of public radio. Under the rules of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), a nominally noncommercial station can announce that a show is supported by a generous grant from a local kombucha brewer, but that announcement cannot include price information ("One delicious cup of cayenne kombucha costs just $9.99!"), comparisons to the competitors ("The best kombucha in the tri-state area!"), or what are known in the trade as "calls to action" ("So come on down to Crazy Eddie's Kombucha Stand—right now!—for our Kombucha in August sale!"). In the past, one might imagine a Republican administration loosening those regulations in exchange for withdrawing its subsidies. But the current FCC chief, Brendan Carr, seems inclined to move in the opposite direction, threatening investigations of underwriting announcements that ordinarily would have met the government's standards.
Still, there certainly are parts of the country where there's money in providing programming to the standard public-media niche, whether or not the FCC will let you be more flagrantly commercial about it. And a lot of those listeners would probably be turned off by overt ads anyway. Your biggest problem might be trying to get them to listen to you on the radio rather than listening online, where they can pick and choose which podcasts they prefer rather than donating to an entire FM package.
Indeed, if the ultimate goal here is to get popular programs into the ears of an upscale urban or suburban audience, and if those shows are easily accessed on the internet, your FM studios with nice offices at the local university might be extraneous anyway. Live by the high-end market, die by the high-end market. So that leads us to option number two: to defiantly broadcast the sorts of things that other outlets don't offer, to rely on community volunteers and operate on a shoestring budget, and to seek donations from listeners who are grateful that you're giving them things they can't find anywhere else.
If this sounds faintly familiar, it's because that's what noncommercial radio stations made a name for themselves by doing before the Corporation for Public Broadcasting was created in 1967. Many of them continued doing it, often styling themselves as "community radio" rather than "public radio," after those subsidies became available. But the people doling out those subsidies didn't always like the idea of funding the audio equivalent of a relentlessly uncommercial indie press, and the money often came with strings attached—inducements to hire more full-time staff, adopt more predictable programming, and chase a more conventional audience.
The big open question about the old community-radio model—about speaking to the niches that both commercial and public radio stations tend to shy away from—is how much the internet has eaten into that base of listeners and donors. We are long past the days when a radio station might be the only place offering obscure music or non-mainstream opinions; the online world overflows with precisely the sorts of listening options that you once had to tune to a 100-watt station broadcasting from a strip mall at 88-point-something to hear. Even the intense localism of these stations can be found on the internet these days, where there are places just to see the neighbors chatting. But that doesn't mean you're doomed; the online and on-air conversations might complement rather than compete with each other. And if you can cover neglected local news, offer technical training to local kids, and give the region's bands and DJs a place to showcase their talents, you just might stay afloat.
Speaking of intense localism: Much of the rhetoric around the rescissions bill has centered on remote rural stations in places with few or no other radio options and maybe not even good cell coverage. Hence the frequent references to the ways that CPB subsidies support emergency communications. As an argument for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, this was pretty weak—even if you think the government needs to pay for such things, you don't need to filter the money through a vast machine powering everything from puppet shows to reunion concerts. (It also sounds more like a state or tribal project than a federal one.) But as a reminder of one sort of broadcasting, it's well taken.
So in that spirit, I'll mention how one sort of highly local rural radio came to northern Canada. I can't say exactly what year this started, because no one seems entirely sure: Not only was it unsubsidized, but it was unlicensed. Tinkerers in Native American communities got their hands on some radio gear abandoned by Mounties and bureaucrats, and they started setting up communications systems. At first, these were just for emergency transmissions and the like, but soon people were playing music, sharing news, and building a sort of ethereal village center. Officials in Ottawa didn't even realize this was going on until well into the 1960s, when a couple of pilots stumbled on one of the unauthorized signals and people south of the 60th Parallel started taking note of what one pirate-radio buff called "impromptu Eskimo services." These days, northern Native outlets usually have licenses and subsidies, but they were initially powered by the sort of initiative that today would fuel a group chat or a weekly Zoom call.
I'm not saying you should adapt to the loss of your CPB check by disappearing into the wilderness, scavenging some archaic equipment, and starting a pirate operation. I'm just saying there are options outside the conventional styles of running a radio station. Even on a low budget, a broadcast project that meets real needs can thrive.