Public media will stop acting like a legacy airline

My first reporting job in public media was as the Central Oregon correspondent for Oregon Public Broadcasting, based in Bend — a city that proudly claims to be the largest in the U.S. more than 100 miles from an interstate highway.

I covered the concerns of rural Oregonians, from the tensions around “backyard burning” of household trash to the joys of mushroom foraging. It remains the best job I’ve ever had.

But very early in my time as a reporter in Bend, editors I’d be working with in Portland, Seattle or Washington, D.C., would ask, “When are you going to move?” or “When do you get a job at a bigger station?”

They weren’t trying to be rude. That was a tried-and-true method of moving up in the world of public radio: Start at a small station and slowly move to better-resourced stations in bigger cities. And the job ladder mirrored the structure of public radio’s network itself.

It reminds me of how the big, legacy airlines built their successful national footprints — using the classic hub-and-spoke system. United built up operations and resources in Newark, Washington Dulles, and Chicago, then connected those hubs to smaller regional airports nearby. That allowed airlines to serve the whole country, but often left travelers in smaller markets making two or three connections to reach their destination, flying smaller planes and paying higher prices.

The public media news system created similar friction. Reporters and journalists, ideas and innovations, and even the news itself often had to travel along the spokes from places like Bend to the hubs of Washington, New York, and Chicago, home to the biggest public media organizations.

But that isn’t the only way to do things — and now that we are asking the existential question of what public media really is anyway, we have the opportunity to overhaul our systems.

Just as Southwest Airlines and other upstart carriers have challenged the legacy airlines by creating point-to-point systems or rolling hubs, I believe public media will throw off the constraints of a system that serves larger metropolitan areas at the expense of the rest of the country.

Regional newsrooms from Texas to California to the Midwest and beyond are already showing how collaborations can create better support systems and shared services for like-minded, geographically aligned stations. Reporting collaborations in the California Newsroom have triggered the overhaul of a law regarding compassionate release for incarcerated people who are dying, coordinated resources during the Los Angeles wildfires, and spurred lawmakers to pass legislation aimed at improving state oversight of nursing homes. The Texas Newsroom produces newscasts and a statewide show daily and has become integral for breaking news planning during floods and other major natural disasters. In fact, the Texas and California Newsrooms have even collaborated on coverage and programming that impacts both states.

Defunding the Corporation for Public Broadcasting will only serve to accelerate that decentralization, and I believe a more networked system, with a greater number of connections, will emerge.

Local stations will look to share resources to produce regional news and grow the network. Technology will allow organizations to highlight content created by community members and non-journalists, while providing more support for small but mighty newsrooms fighting the good fight around the country. By empowering local stations to document what is happening in their neighborhoods, the national network can focus on the news from Washington and Wall Street, along with international news, creating a new journalistically focused version of the “bundle” that kept public media sustainable for generations.

Most hopefully, reporters in places like Bend won’t have to move to earn more money or gain access to better editors and resources. Remote work technologies, a better membership model, collaborative networks, and the ability to connect with audiences from around the country will allow a reporter who is from central Oregon and wants to stay there to build a brand and a body of reporting that creates value for the community — whether it’s within the framework of a local station or via a Substack newsletter and monetized podcast.