This is the On the Media Midweek podcast. I'm for Gladstone. This summer, Republicans clawed back over a billion dollars that had been pledged to public media, but it wasn't until this month that the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, long-time distributor of much of that money, started to wind down operations, and those federal funds finally ran out.

Now many of those stations are weighing whether to spend that money on national programs,

principally NPR and elsewhere, or to fund journalism in and about their local communities.

We're affected, too.

New York Public Radio makes this show

and also distributes it to hundreds of local stations across the country.

But if those stations can no longer afford us,

how can we recover what they've been paying for that show and that audience?

So begins a new reckoning to save not just individual stations,

but the interconnected system that makes public radio so special.

La Fontaine E. Oliver is the president, CEO,

and executive chair of New York Public Radio,

and also my boss,

since we're in the middle of our pledge week here at WNYC,

I invited him into the studio to talk about how federal cuts are changing public media

and how our station and others are facing this critical moment.

Welcome to the show, LaFontaine. Thank you for having

me, Brooke. So in the wake of the CPB closing its doors, you announced the station-to-station

programming project. Explain what that is. Stations were relying on checks from CPB to arrive this

month in October, and those checks are not going to arrive. Stations were relying on checks from CPB to arrive this month in October, and those checks are not going to arrive.

Stations are going to be crunched for cash, and we decided that we wanted to step up and do something special to help the system out in this moment.

And we thought the best way to do that would be to offer our complete suite of national programs to stations that are experiencing extreme financial difficulty, to offer it to them free of charge.

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