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It is, you may have noticed, WHQR’s fall pledge drive. To the casual listener, this can feel like a mild annoyance, a gentle shaming for listeners who don’t donate, or a warm affirmation for those who do. For most, in the blur of a week with all its other demands — work, school, family — it passes quickly. A weird wrinkle in the routine that smooths itself out in relatively short order.
But for us, here in the newsroom, it is a different experience.
It is a bit like a job performance review, mixed with a high-stakes game of craps, taking place during an endurance ultramarathon. Fueled by necessity, station coffee, and some generous food donations from local restaurants, we go on the air for twelve hours a day and ‘pitch,’ making our case to listeners, explaining why they should donate money to help support the programming, staff, and equipment for which we’ve already paid. Operating on a pretty lean budget, that puts a lot of pressure on pledging. The station has some reserve funds, but the drives are essentially make it or break it.
To the unfamiliar, this can sound like insanity. It sometimes feels like that, even to seasoned pros. We aren’t raising money for next year; we’re raising money for costs already on the books, paying back checks we’ve already written. Every year we jump out of the financial airplane and hope we can afford a parachute before we hit the ground.
It’s reassuring that this system has worked for public media stations all around the country for many years, for WHQR since 1984, and yet … legacy only goes so far. In my line of work, you’re only as good as your last few bylines, and you can’t rest on your laurels long. And so, at least for the news team, each pledge drive feels like a gamble: did we do enough, make enough of an impact, cover enough ground? In short, were we worth it?
There’s a professional and existential dimension to this, too. Success or failure during a pledge drive has obvious consequences for the station, but it has deep ramifications in the psyche of public media journalists. I’ve been part of a few pledge drives that struggled or came up short. You can guess how that feels.
These things are, of course, overdetermined: donations depend on economic factors, social conditions, and the personal finances of hundreds of individuals. There are plenty of reasons not to take it personally. But as journalists who love this community and our work, we of course do just that.
I say all this, not as a tale of woe, not to crowdsource sympathy, but because I wouldn’t have it any other way.
I think, during each drive, of Churchill, whom I’ve paraphrased on the air a few times: this is the worst form of journalism funding — except for all the other forms that have been tried.
Based on the media landscape right now, I can honestly say this model — a community-supported newsroom — is the best hope for the survival of local journalism.
And journalism is going through it right now, from NPR and The Washington Post to the local paper. We’re taking fire from all sides, as well as some self-inflicted wounds.
I know it is en vogue to cite President Trump’s assaults on the press — from personal insults, often against women, and through policy and lawfare — especially given his potentially unconstitutional bans on CNN, MSNOW, and Politico this week.
But, as dangerous and corrosive as Trump’s actions are, I think he’s doing what he always does: attacking where he sees weakness. And there is weakness, real structural weakness, in the Fourth Estate, due to loss of trust, political polarization, social media ‘content producers,’ venture capital financialization, and — oh, yeah — artificial intelligence. Presidents come and go; these problems run deeper.
Here come the robots
For a decade, we’ve seen papers purchased by investment firms, eager to load up local papers with debt, run them on a skeleton crew, and finally sell them for parts. But now we’re seeing a new twist in the quest to squeeze revenue out of shrinking newsrooms
Just this week, the major publisher McClatchy cut dozens of positions from at least 17 newsrooms, including the Charlotte News & Observer. At The Miami Herald, which has won two dozen Pulitzers and helped take down Jeffrey Epstein, deep cuts rocked both the paper and the community it serves.
McClatchy, which owns 29 papers in 14 states, was acquired by a private investment firm in 2020. Executives pointed to raw financial data: readership is down, costs are up. The company also blamed competition from social media influencers.
Those execs aren’t wrong, but their solution has alarmed many journalists.
As CEO Tony Hunter recently said at a company town hall in May, “We have a company-wide effort to agentify the entire enterprise.”
In other words, McClatchy is wholeheartedly embracing AI, and jettisoning journalists, editors, and other employees who aren’t getting on board. As reported this week by Straight Arrow News, that includes using a chatbot to rewrite human-authored articles, repackaging different versions while still including their byline (to the frustration of some reporters). And, in an even starker pivot, the company is standing up a “content innovation lab,” essentially shifting resources from local journalism to AI-generated lifestyle content.
Other companies have been playing footsies with AI content. Two years ago, I wrote about Gannett’s use of AI content, which was blamed on a third party. Last year, the L.A. Times rolled out a feature providing AI-written ‘counterpoint’ opinions. Right out of the gate, the AI downplayed the historical threat of the Ku Klux Klan; the paper pulled the piece within 24 hours, but defended the use of AI to provide alternative perspectives. In February of this year, The Plain Dealer editor Chris Quinn defended the Cleveland paper’s use of AI to write articles based on notes from journalists, arguing it gave humans more time for reporting.
Now the gloves, and the mask, are off — and McClatchy is saying out loud what other companies were only whispering: they don’t want to pay humans to do the human work of reporting.
On the one hand, you can’t ignore financial realities. Investigative journalism often doesn’t pay for itself, and new outlets have long sought out other lower-cost, higher-reward areas to cover: arts and entertainment, sports, etc. But when that stops working, there’s a real problem.
On the other hand, AI slop is unlikely to generate more trust — and more investment, through subscriptions or non-profit donations — from the public. What’s more, if McClatchy can use AI to generate a lifestyle article, so can anyone else, using even the free versions of Claude, Gemini, or ChatGPT. People don’t often pay for what they can get for nothing.
Dog won't hunt
Maybe AI always would have posed an existential threat to journalism – as it will pose a threat to many other human enterprises – but from my perspective, it’s happened now because the financial model of journalism has failed.
For years, advertising was a necessary evil in the media business. I’ve been in the room, as a journalist, getting lectured about how my reporting offended an advertiser who, it was unsubtly noted, paid my salary. I’ve seen other reporters yanked off stories, or entire beats, because someone had been rubbed the wrong way. In the best cases, I’ve seen editors run interference, defending the independence of their newsrooms, and publishers who knew how to keep the peace without sacrificing their integrity. In the worst cases, I’ve seen pay-to-play coverage, and major stories ignored to appease an advertiser.
But now, the advertising system, inherent vice that it always was, can’t really keep papers afloat. Tech monopolies, especially Google’s, have gutted the promise of digital ad revenue, and print ads were already dying when Craigslist was still a thing.
TV news is hanging in there, but it faces some of the same challenges as radio: decreasing advertising, an aging core demographic, and the rise of on-demand content. Fewer and fewer people are willing to make an appointment to watch the 6 o’clock news, especially for stories that were online and on social media hours earlier. As Poynter noted last year, the major revenue once provided by retransmission fees (what cable companies pay to carry local stations) is “in peril.”
Even political campaign spending, which still gives TV stations a major boost, especially in even years (and even more during Presidential elections), is shifting to social media. As a station manager once told me, "One day, we'll wake up to find that dog won't hunt."
Many TV newsrooms have wisely been shifting to digital news and social media, but the ultimate shift away from the infrastructure and viewership of traditional broadcast TV will be messy – I don’t think anyone knows quite what it will look like, or how successful it will be.
One solution, which has been highly effective for some papers, and is definitely under consideration for some current TV newsrooms, is the paywall. One hopes that, with a dedicated reader base, good local news outlets can ask for a little more each month, and keep their heads above water. In some ways, these newsrooms are adapting the public media model for a for-profit outlet: asking folks to pay for a subscription not just based on its utility value — paying for $5 or $10 worth of news a month — but as an investment in the mission. For the sake of the Fourth Estate, and local journalism across the country, I hope this can work. But the data shows it mostly works at scale, because paywalls are a volume game.
The downside, especially for a community news organization, is that inevitably some of your best reporting will be off-limits to folks who can’t afford it — those who may be the most vulnerable to the results of the local politics and policies you’re trying to report on.
All of this is why I came to public media, and why I’ve stayed for six years now.
But it’s not the only reason.
Answering the call
Poll after poll shows the public has lost a lot of faith in “the media” — although that covers a lot of ground. Faith in the talking heads on MSNOW or FOX is not the same as faith in The Wall Street Journal or Pro Publica, and faith in a national news outlet is not the same as faith in your local newspaper, public radio station, or TV newsroom. (Local news does tend to trend a little better, but not enough to ignore the problem.)
This week, at an event hosted by The Atlantic, the magazine’s editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg spoke with Amna Nawaz, co-anchor and co-managing editor of PBS NewsHour, and Joe Kahn, executive editor for The New York Times. The magazine ran the transcript as an article, with no less lofty a title than “The Goal of Contemporary Journalism.”
There was plenty of conversation about attacks from Trump, as well as the efforts to attack news outlets as part of a broader ‘war on truth,’ waged from the left and the right, to discredit institutions writ large, because there are financial and political incentives to undermine reality.
But near the end of the talk, the moderator prodded the guests toward some self-reflection.
“Let’s accept that there has been an intentional effort, call it the last 10 years, to undermine faith and confidence in a lot of institutions that hold people in power accountable. The media is just one. The plan is working as intended. But isn’t it also true that we own some of this as an industry? The call’s coming from inside the house? We’ve done some of this to ourselves,” Evan Smith, The Atlantic’s events director, asked.
Nawaz noted that many institutions were taking for granted that people would trust them.
“Back in 1976, the trust was high, and we thought that would just continue. The 1976 media landscape was a universe away from where we are today,” she said, adding that, at least at the local level, she saw opportunities for journalists to build (or rebuild) trust with their communities.
Goldberg’s answer, which also looked to the local level, was a bit more searching, addressing both the elitism and ideological leanings of major newsrooms, noting that hiring all their journalists from the same top colleges caused “a certain set of liberal assumptions that come in more than conservative assumptions.”
Goldberg made it clear that the main problem, in his view, was the ‘war on truth,’ but acknowledged there was a lack of viewpoint diversity. That’s sometimes a corollary to attacks on DEI — diversity based on identities, not philosophies — but that’s not quite what Goldberg was after here. He’s trying to thread a needle, rejecting the idea of “liberal bias” in the day-to-day reporting while acknowledging the “unspoken assumptions about the way the world is organized" that underpin that work.
I think that’s healthy: challenging assumptions and seeking out varied perspectives.
In the wrong hands, that advice could lead a news outlet to a reactionary stance, like the knee-jerk reorientation of The Washington Post’s opinion page to an exclusively free-market cheerleader that just so happens to align with the Trump administration. And, ‘diversity of thought’ could be used as an excuse to push the Overton Window further right. The Proud Boys and Oath Keepers have varied perspectives, do they not? (I think of my J-school professor who admonished us that our job was not “six minutes for the Jews, six minutes for the Nazis” — in other words, not everyone gets an equal say.)
Still, there’s something in Goldberg’s suggestion that landed with me, as someone who works in, and cares about, public media.
I think some of what Smith is talking about in his question has to do with bias, or perceived bias, and elitism, but also a retreat from communities and conversation — too often, the signal runs in only one direction.
I talk to people now who are largely done with the 'mainstream media' for good, for a lot of different reasons that don’t always map neatly onto the political spectrum. In many cases, they felt like their perspectives — which they often shared with some significant portion of the population — were treated as alien, conspiratorial, stupid, or unimportant. And over the last few years, many turned to other news sources — including social media — that made them feel included. In some cases, that meant sources painting a distorted and often dark portrait of things, with little regard for the truth or journalism as you or I might recognize it.
I think we have a lot of useful tools at WHQR to explore more ideas and perspectives. Not just our reporting, of which I'm very proud, but our interviews on The Newsroom, and our commentaries, letters to the editor, and opinion pieces. Could we be more aggressively soliciting input for all of those? Yes, and we’re working on it.
And of course, this column, where I can reflect on why we framed certain stories the way we did, the values that underpinned those decisions, and the places where we felt conflicted or uncertain. It lets me serve as a kind of ad hoc public editor, and I think 'showing our work' can help keep the lines of communication open, and give folks a way to constructively push back.
Public media’s job, and by extension my job, is to explain what’s going on, in context. But it is also to reflect the community back to itself: this is who we are — for better and worse. That, for me, doesn’t mean pivoting away from the perspectives we’re traditionally covered, especially those of the most vulnerable in our community; it means widening the aperture and adjusting for blind spots. Yes, and.
I always think there’s room for improvement there, and I think a community-supported public media station is a good position to build (and rebuild) trust with the community. If the call’s coming inside the house, we ought to answer, and deal with it.
If you think The New York Times is biased — and I certainly think it has some hard slants on certain topics — good luck getting the Sulzbergers, or Kahn, or even a department editor on the horn. People email and call me all the time. Sometimes they just walk into the station, and it’s not always just to say ‘hi’ or ‘good work.’ We frequently have tough conversations. I think that’s important.
This is why many in major national outlets suggest — rightly, I think — that local journalists have a better shot at improving things. Our doors, and phone lines, are open — and not just during the occasional week of fundraising.
The Pitch
We’re halfway through our pledge drive as I write this. The numbers look ok — and the next three or four days could be great, or they could be another white-knuckle ride to the finish. You can never be sure.
Are there better ways to do this? Maybe. Some have suggested a more robust government-funded public media program, including veteran reporter and podcast host John Biewen, who delved into the idea at the end of his recent Scene on Radio series.
The resurrection of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting would help, as would something like California’s ambitious new grant program to support local journalism. But CPB only funded about 8% of our budget, and it seems politically unlikely that Congress would ever pursue funding public media on the level of British or European governments. Likewise, I doubt that North Carolina would pursue something so progressive — and even if they did, California’s grants are one-time only. They don’t solve the structural problems.
And so, the imperfect system of public media is what we have. Organizations like WHQR and NPR, and the close relatives in the emerging field of publicly supported nonprofit journalism — at both the local and national level, think The Border Belt Independent or Pro Publica – aren’t asking you to buy a product as much as we’re asking you to invest in a resource.
As I said, people don't often pay for something they can get for nothing. That is, unless it's something they really believe in. In the case of nonprofit reporting, folks might not only pay but pay more than their fair share — and they do so willingly, because they think it’s worth it.
As I said, it seems insane. But also, incredible.
I think of it like the public library: if it didn’t exist, and you dreamt it up today, and tried to pitch it, you’d be laughed right out of the room: “Hear me out, we’re gonna produce national, regional, and local reporting, for radio, web, and podcasts, and we’re not going to charge a cent, ever… Sharks? Sharks, where are you going…?”
Crazy.
And yet, that’s the pitch. That’s what we’re offering. That’s what we’re asking you to support, because we believe it’s worth it. That’s the mission.
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