Public Media Company Insights

  Public Media Company has received grant funding from the Rogers Family Foundation, Wyncote Foundation, FJC – A Foundation of Philanthropic Funds, and other generous donors. This support enables Public Media Company to work with eight small public media stations in 2022 that serve diverse and/or rural audiences to provide customized insight and actionable plans for increased growth and local impact. The Impact for...

When Chicago Public Media/WBEZ was presented with the idea of potentially acquiring the Chicago Sun-Times, the leadership of Chicago Public Media needed assistance analyzing the opportunity and understanding its strategic strengths and weaknesses quickly. This is Public Media Company’s core skill – we are frequently called upon to assess a local media property, its revenues, expenses, and operations and make detailed recommendations about how...

Please support our work to keep public media strong and available in communities across the U.S. by making a contribution to Public Media Company through Colorado Gives. Donations are accepted through ColoradoGives.org. No matter where you live, schedule your donations in advance starting Nov. 1 on Public Media Company’s Colorado Gives page.   What is Colorado Gives Day? Every donation made on Colorado Gives...

It’s been six years since VuHaus Group was launched as an independent non-profit dedicated to connecting public media’s music discovery stations with artists and audiences across the country. Public Media Company and five leading public media organizations launched VuHaus Group in 2015 with a commitment to create meaningful distribution and revenue opportunities for music stations. The 20 current affiliates of VuHaus include joint licensees, stand-alone music stations, and NPR...

Congratulations to Carlos Barrionuevo, our colleague here at Public Media Company. Contributor Development Partnership (CDP) recently announced that Goli Sheikholeslami and Carlos Barrionuevo have been added to the CDP Board of Directors. CDP provides a suite of fundraising services to help public media stations grow their revenue and impact. As a CDP board member guiding the direction of the enterprise, Carlos Barrionuevo brings  +20 years...

Last week’s big news from Chicago (no, not the Bears leaving the city) marked the latest chapter in a decade-long transition from local journalism primarily driven by a monopoly business model centered around a legacy print product to non-profit organizations anchored by community support. This first of its kind, this potential merger could ensure the survival of aggressive, daily watchdog journalism and expand the...

Diversity in public media is getting a lot of attention these days, so with the advent of the new census data, we’d thought we’d do a comparison of how public media compares to the growth in the diversity of the U.S. population overall. The diversity of the United States has changed considerably over the past decade based on recently released data from the 2020...

Public Media Company worked with Ideastream Public Media in Cleveland, Ohio, and WKSU-FM in Akron, Ohio, to analyze and architect how the two stations could leverage their broadcast assets to amplify the work of local public media journalists in the Akron – Cleveland metropolitan areas. The two stations recognized that if they pooled their broadcast signals, they could have one large signal for the...

Since our inception 20 years ago, Public Media Company continues to embrace our mission of helping stations provide new, innovative service models to increase their sustainability. We advocated for multiple formats in our “More Channels, More Service” campaign and our Non-Commercial Filing Window project in 2007; Pioneered tax-exempt financing as a tool for public broadcasters; Co-launched collaborative service models such as VuHaus;  Combined technical...

CREATING BUSINESS MODELS FOR JOURNALISM COLLABORATIONS  Public Media Company has always lived by our mission to foster sustainable local independent media growth, but how we achieve that has evolved as public media has changed to meet the needs of local communities. More recently, that has included supporting the development and ongoing financial sustainability of regional journalism collaborations across the county. In our early years,...