NorthEast Radio Watch 9/15/2025: WPSU Faces Shutdown

In this week’s issue… First casualty of CPB cuts looms – Sinclair consolidates RI TV – More studio moves in ON – Bridges lands with Connoisseur – Remembering NY’s Ordway, Canada’s Christensen

By SCOTT FYBUSH

*Looking back on more than three decades of writing this column, it’s hard to remember a time of more seismic change than the deregulation-driven consolidation of broadcast ownership in the mid-1990s. Every week, it seemed like there was a new headline that would have been unimaginable just a few years earlier, as small groups got swallowed into big groups that became even bigger groups, bringing about a stampede of format changes and personnel moves.

So when I say that we’re living in even more unprecedented times now, it’s not being said lightly.

And yet here we are in a week that brought news of still more TV station consolidation – and the unimaginable possibility that a significant chunk of PENNSYLVANIA may soon lose its public radio and TV service in the aftermath of the rescission of CPB funding.

For 60 years, a mostly rural region of the Keystone State between Pittsburgh and Harrisburg, and stretching north to the New York line, has been served by Penn State University’s WPSU-TV (Channel 3), joined in the 1980s by public radio service from WPSU-FM (91.5).

Now that service is slated to shut down by June 2026 after the finance committee of Penn State’s board of trustees voted down a proposal to transfer WPSU to Philadelphia’s WHYY.

Discussions about WPSU’s future apparently started a year and a half ago, long before the rescission vote that took away what would have been $1.3 million in federal funding to the stations in the next fiscal year. Even after a round of layoffs in June, WPSU still depended on that money as well as about $3.4 million in annual support from Penn State itself to maintain its operations.

So what went wrong, and what happens now?