NorthEast Radio Watch 6/9/2025: Urgency Grows for Public Media

In this week’s issue… Public broadcasters plead for help – Connoisseur restructures leadership – Pennsylvania AM goes dark – Succession plan for veteran college radio manager

By SCOTT FYBUSH

*It’s a turbulent time to be a manager in public broadcasting right now. As we’ve been saying for months now, there’s nothing an industry needs more than certainty about funding and regulation, and this past week was an especially bad one on both counts.

On the regulatory side, we’re now down to two FCC commissioners with the abrupt exit of Republican commissioner Nathan Simington, leaving the Commission with just chairman Brendan Carr and Democratic commissioner Anna Gomez, far short of the quorum it needs to do much of anything when it comes to policy moves.

And on the funding side for public media, the White House is pushing ahead with its attempt to claw back the federal funds already allocated to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Is it legal? That’s unclear. Will it happen anyway? Nobody knows, but it’s not safe to assume it won’t – and that means public broadcasters are continuing to push their audiences to reach out to lawmakers to show their support for the medium.

In the meantime, some public broadcasters continue to make cutbacks ahead of an uncertain future. It happened again last week at Boston’s GBH, which laid off 45 of its employees, about 6% of its total staff, in a move station CEO Susan Goldberg said was due to “federal funding cuts, rising costs of doing business, and the need to evolve our work to meet audiences’ needs.”

Those cuts included Laura Carlo, the morning host of classical WCRB (99.5) and a veteran of the classical station going all the way back to its pre-GBH days as a commercial station on 102.5. For now, there’s no morning host listed on the Classical CRB schedule.

On the Cape and Islands, Steve Junker lost his job as managing editor of news and host of the Friday “News Roundup” that was the flagship local show on WCAI/WNAN/WZAI.

*Across the border in RHODE ISLAND, there was an optimistic note from the merged Rhode Island PBS and “The Public’s Radio”: a year after they came together under one board, the joint radio/TV operation will take on the new name “Ocean State Media” this fall, in a move CEO Pam Johnston noted leaves out the word “Public.”

“We heard that from audiences, both those that we have and those that we don’t yet have, that that was an interesting word, and so we listened,” she told TPR host Ian Donnis.

“Lots of people felt as though they didn’t feel invited into an organization with public in their name, who knows what the connotations are. They come from a variety of different societal places, but it came back as a theme,” she said.

No logo has been announced yet, and the transition is expected to take several months as radio completes its move into the RIPBS headquarters.