Gains & Losses at Public Media Stations: The COVID edition

It has been three years since the emergence of COVID-19 and its impact on global life. To understand how the pandemic affected public media’s financial health, we analyzed station Annual Financial Report (AFR) data from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) to help uncover recent trends in public radio and television finances. Our analysis has found that overall public media revenue in 2021 (the...

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Public Media Playbook

Public Media Company was called upon to assist in the development of the “Public Media Playbook,” a white paper and online toolkit to explore mergers between local and regional online newsrooms and public media. The playbook was conceived after the acquisition of NJ Spotlight by WNET, which Public Media Company helped plan and facilitate. Public Media Company was asked to create tools to assist...

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Public Media Revenue Trends

Public radio stations are continuing their long trend of revenue growth and public television stations are also growing again after a period of contraction brought on by the Great Recession. However, success is not equally distributed. On average, larger public radio and television stations are growing at much higher rates than their small station counterparts. These are the key takeaways from the latest Annual...

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Coming Together For Vermont

Public Media Company congratulates Vermont PBS and Vermont Public Radio on the decision to join forces and strengthen service for the people of Vermont. It has been a pleasure working with such dedicated and insightful leaders over the past several months. FROM CURRENT: The boards of Vermont PBS and Vermont Public Radio unanimously voted Wednesday to merge their organizations into one public media station....

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Public Radio Leading the Way

PMC’s last blog post focused on public media revenue trends during the Great Recession (December 2007 to June 2009) to help reveal insights that may be relevant to the current COVID-19 crisis. In this post, we explore the relative successes of public stations since the last recession to discover what further lessons can be learned. Our analysis has found that public radio has flourished...

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Public Media Company Announces Public Media Bond Program

Boulder, CO. (June 30, 2020) — Public Media Company is pleased to announce the Public Media Bond Program for public media organizations to leverage their assets for capital projects. The new national bond program provides public broadcasting entities access to taxable and tax-exempt bonds to finance their capital improvement projects through the Colorado Educational and Cultural Facilities Authority (CECFA). Public Media Company pioneered the...

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Coronavirus: Protecting the Present & Preparing for the Future

The Covid-19 crisis is unprecedented in its impact on society across the world and has forced organizations to take immediate steps to protect the health of their employees as well as the health of their organizations. It’s incredibly challenging to take immediate mitigating action while also planning for future challenges but it’s an unfortunate reality that all public media organizations need to face.  This...

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How a Public Media Station Can Work Remotely: Advice From a Company That Does It All the Time

With the spread of COVID-19, many public media outlets are quickly becoming “distributed” organizations – with employees working remotely from home or other places outside of the office. This is nothing new to us: Public Media Company has been working in this manner throughout our 19 year history. Since we work with local media around the country, we don’t locate everyone in a single...

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Are Public Radio & TV Station Revenue Trends Really That Different?

Our October blog post explored how public radio revenue is now higher than public television revenue thanks to significant radio growth over the past decade. The post also highlighted great disparities between radio stations of different sizes – big growth for large stations and revenue declines for small stations. The variation by station size is also very evident in public television. Small TV stations...

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