Donors ‘stepping up’ to bolster stations after CPB funding cuts
When Louisville Public Media Development Director Ellen Oost went on air the morning of July 18 to raise funds to cover the looming loss of CPB funding, she thought the radio organization’s internal donations tracker was broken.
LPM went live with an emergency fundraiser at 6 a.m., hours after Congress eliminated CPB’s funding for the next two years. Passage of the rescission package blew holes in the budgets of public stations across the country.
Early morning hours of an LPM fund drive typically are “priming the pump for the rest of the day of fundraising,” Oost said, when more donations come in. That morning, however, LPM’s donation tracker, which posts funds raised across all three stations, showed listener contributions totaling $33,000 in each of the first two hours.
Related Knowledge Center: State of the business model
The traditional journalism business model has long since collapsed, and news organizations have shrunk or disappeared entirely. While a number of promising experiments are under way, the public has not shown a willingness to buy what news organizations are selling.
Related Knowledge Center: Local media
The hollowing out of the local news ecosystem has been well documented; in some communities, efforts are underway to reverse the growing news desert.