A ‘bridge fund’ buys time for public media — but it may not be enough
View of the sign outside NPR headquarters on July 22
(CNN) — Gerald Rodriguez, the general manager of an NPR affiliate in rural Colorado, expected federal funding for public media to shrink. He didn’t expect it to disappear almost overnight.
“What we thought would happen is that they would just cut the funding a little bit,” Rodriguez told CNN. “But, no, they totally gutted it out completely. We didn’t expect that.”
His station, KRZA, is the only public radio station in Colorado’s San Luis Valley; the next closest station is in Colorado Springs, nearly three hours away.
With a staff of just two people — Rodriguez and one other colleague — the station provides local news and weather to residents across the rural region, including many who lack reliable internet access. During disasters, he added, the station often becomes a primary source of information.
That mission became much harder in July, when federal lawmakers clawed back funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, eliminating roughly half of KRZA’s budget.
“It basically hurt all these little stations like us,” Rodriguez said. “We’re two people doing 100 jobs.”
Across the country, dozens of small public stations faced similarly steep cuts. Within weeks of the rescission bill’s passage, the nonprofit Public Media Company launched a “bridge fund” to help local stations survive the sudden loss of federal support.
As of late January, the bridge fund raised $66.5 million toward its $100 million goal. In December, the bridge fund disbursed $26 million, its first round of grants, which went to 74 organizations operating 186 stations that collectively serve about 30 million Americans.
Tim Isgitt, the organization’s chief executive, said the goal is to buy struggling stations time. “The opportunity here, to support these most vulnerable stations, is not only an opportunity to secure service for those communities but also an opportunity to shore up the whole network across the country,” he told CNN.
Philanthropy steps in
The fund quickly attracted support from major philanthropic organizations, including the Knight Foundation, the Ford Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation. In November, comedian John Oliver raised another $1.54 million for the fund through an auction that included a Bob Ross painting.
Erik Langner, the bridge fund’s executive director, said he has been encouraging stations to temper their long-term expectations.
“They have to make moves now, assuming that federal funding won’t come back,” Langner told CNN.
The impact of the cuts varies widely, he stressed. Some states, including New York and New Mexico, have expanded public media support, while others — including Florida and Indiana — have reduced or altogether eliminated state funding.
Other organizations have tried to ease the strain. In August, PBS reduced the dues it charges local stations by $35 million, and NPR later announced a similar fee-relief plan. The Alaska Community Foundation awarded $2.9 million in grants to its state’s public media stations; New Mexico’s legislature could give $430,000 to tribal stations this summer.
Even so, Langner said the broader picture remains uncertain.
While the bridge fund has helped stabilize many stations in the short term, he said it is also meant to push them toward longer-term sustainability — including sharing resources or collaborating more closely with nearby outlets.
“This is the bridge to that, right — doing things differently,” Isgitt said.
‘We will hit a wall’
For some stations, the funding gap remains daunting.
“There will come a time that we will hit a wall,” said Betsy Schwien, the general manager of Smoky Hills PBS in Kansas.
Despite being one of PBS’s smallest stations, Smoky Hills’ signal reaches two-thirds of the state, covering 71 counties. Much of that area relies on the station’s transmitters for television service.
The station operates with a staff of nine and has long worked with a tight budget. But shortly after Smoky Hills approved its $1.8 million annual budget, lawmakers eliminated roughly 52% of its funding.
The bridge fund replaced a little more than half of that loss, which Schwien called a “blessing,” helping pay for basic operations, employees and the transmitters.
“It will definitely help support us, not only this fiscal year,” Schwien said.
But it hasn’t solved the long-term problem, she said. With a significant portion of what Smoky Hills anticipated receiving still missing, Schwien said she’s implemented several cost-saving measures.
“It doesn’t make up a million dollars,” she said.
Schwien said the station already struggles to meet requests from communities across its coverage area for visits and events.
“We just don’t have the resources, we don’t have the people, we don’t have the time,” she said.
After the bridge…
Early last year, before the federal funding cuts ever took effect, Langner and Isgitt projected that roughly 115 stations could vanish within a year, affecting 43 million Americans in rural or underserved areas.
The bridge fund has helped stave off that worst-case scenario — for now. But Langner said the cuts could reshape what stations can produce.
“The perverse outcome,” he said, “is this is going to lead to a significant reduction of local content because that tends to be more expensive and time-consuming to produce.”
As stations’ budgets shrink, many are likely to rely more heavily on national programming. Langner said the bridge fund encourages stations to share resources in hopes they’ll collaborate to keep some local services alive.
Though Smoky Hills doesn’t produce local news, Schwien said the loss of funding will cause local journalism to “slowly fizzle out,” leaving larger national outlets to “dominate even more.”
She remains “hopeful that our federal government, those that make our decisions for us, come to a realization how important public media is, period.”
Over in Colorado, a less optimistic Rodriguez is keenly aware that the bridge fund’s financial relief is temporary.
“At the end of ’27, that’s where we’re going to be a little worried,” he said. “We’re going to start back in the same situation where we were last year, scrambling around trying to figure out how to make up for the losses.”
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