Last July, the U.S. Congress canceled $1.1 billion in funding for 1,500 public radio and television stations across the nation. In the blink of an eye, Vermont Public — the state’s nonprofit radio and television broadcaster — lost $2 million, or about 10 percent of its annual budget.
The aftermath of that financial shock demonstrated the organization’s listener loyalty and financial resilience. The station’s 41,000 members largely made up the loss in a rage-giving surge that lasted for several months.
“One of the biggest lessons I learned in my first year here is never underestimate Vermont,” Vermont Public’s CEO, Vijay Singh, said in the aftermath.
The 2025 crisis hit just as Vermont Public was emerging from the conflicts and logistical problems of a previous challenge: the merger of Vermont Public Radio with Vermont PBS television in July 2021. That created one of the wealthiest public media outlets in the Northeast, thanks largely to the tens of millions of dollars that Vermont PBS brought with it.
But the new organization also has a complicated mission — serving as the prime news source for thousands of Vermonters while also providing classical music, television dramas and “Sesame Street.” Some critics question whether Vermont Public’s award-winning news department is doing enough, given the overall organization’s 104 employees, $61 million endowment and $21 million annual budget.
Internally, Singh and his staff are grappling with Vermont Public’s dual challenges. Will listeners continue to give at an elevated rate, enough to fill the gap in the organization’s annual operating budget? And as young people abandon radio and television for online news, social media and podcasts, how can the organization adapt to serve Vermonters?
“We know that the way public media reaches its audience is going to have to evolve in order to stay relevant,” longtime board member Marguerite Dibble said. “We’ve known that public media was going to face these very intense headwinds, and I’ve always felt really optimistic because [our] content is still highly relevant.”
And Now, the News
Much of that local content is produced by Vermont Public’s news department of 10 reporters whose work appears on the radio, in videos and online. They include veterans Peter Hirschfeld and Bob Kinzel, who together have more than 60 years of experience covering the Statehouse.
The news team demonstrated its strength in recent years with regional and national Edward R. Murrow awards that recognize the best in broadcast and digital journalism. It scooped other outlets when it reported Sen. Bernie Sanders’ (I-Vt.) decision to run for president in 2020 and has shown it can dig deeply, as in the three-part series in 2023 that explored the ongoing dispute between Québec-based Abenaki and Vermonters who claim Abenaki ancestry.
It also draws listeners to the noontime “Vermont Edition” interview show that delves into a mix of state issues and softer topics. A separate crew led by former “Vermont Edition” host Jane Lindholm produces the nationally syndicated “But Why” podcast for children. On television, Vermont Public continues the long-running Friday program, “Vermont This Week,” a reporters’ roundtable in which journalists, including from Seven Days, analyze the week’s top stories.
This sort of coverage has won Vermont Public dedicated followers.
Megan Humphrey, a longtime member of Vermont Public, said she listens to its radio programs “all day long” because the news is “vetted and fact-based, and that’s important to me.” She likes the range of television programming, too, and is a faithful consumer of “Finding Your Roots” and “Vermont This Week.”
But is Vermont Public ambitious enough?
Tom McKone, a columnist for the Barre-Montpelier Times Argus and Rutland Herald newspapers, recently compared Vermont Public with New Hampshire Public Radio. That organization has a similar-size reporting staff and an annual budget of just $10 million to serve a population more than twice the size of Vermont’s. (New Hampshire PBS, the broadcast television station, is a separate nonprofit with a budget of about $6 million a year.)
Yet with that relatively modest budget, NHPR produces two nationally syndicated news shows, major investigations (one of which was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2024), and popular podcasts such as “Bear Brook” and “Civics 101” that have attracted national audiences. NHPR is in the top 2 percent of podcast producers in the U.S., with about 500,000 downloads a month.
McKone’s newspaper column concluded, “We depend on Vermont Public for statewide, national and international news, but it does not provide significant local coverage.”
Several former Vermont Public board members say the organization, in light of its substantial resources, has a responsibility to offer more hard-hitting news coverage with less emphasis on nostalgic lifestyle reporting.
One of those former board members, technology entrepreneur Tom Evslin, said the organization serves “a self-identified highly educated elite, rather than a broader Vermont audience.” He said the news operation should be producing more in-depth coverage that bucks the institutional status quo.
Vermont Public news director Mark Davis defends the station’s work and says there is more to come. He said he is proud of the quality and quantity of the journalism produced by the reporting and editing team, which he described as “better than it’s ever been.”
“I think we have a lot of really talented, very driven people,” Davis said. “I think we have a clear strategy going forward about how to apply strategy and utilize that talent.”
Singh, too, said he wants to produce more news, though he added “not necessarily with a bigger team.”
Vermont Public’s reporting staff now includes people hired in recent years from other news outlets, including the Burlington Free Press and VTDigger. Seven Days reporter Derek Brouwer, who has won awards for work including his in-depth coverage of people struggling with drug addiction and homelessness, left the paper in December to join Vermont Public’s newsroom.
Better pay may attract some of its journalists. Last fall, Vermont Public advertised a “Reporter II” position in Seven Days that offered a salary of $60,108 to $70,715. The pay for news reporters at Seven Days is $48,000 to $58,000; VTDigger advertised a reporting job two months ago that paid $47,000 to $55,000.
Davis attributed Vermont Public’s recruiting success to its supportive culture. “I think we treat people in their work with a lot of respect,” he said.
Dying to Contribute
Singh took the helm at Vermont Public in late 2024 after the bulk of the radio-television merger work was complete. At that point, the two organizations had been reconfiguring their operations for the better part of three years. A number of people left, exhausted by conflicts over news content and deadlines, use of videography, and rules for the TV employees, who have a labor union, and radio employees, who do not. The pandemic made in-person meetings to discuss problems impossible.
Cost savings didn’t materialize as hoped, and the newly merged organization ran deficits for several years. Former CEO Scott Finn, who drove the merger, left in December 2023.
In the end, board members say, all the heartache was worth it, and if it wasn’t a match made in heaven, it was close enough. Vermont PBS came with its $56 million windfall from the 2017 sale of one of its broadcast licenses. Vermont Public Radio brought to the table a $12 million endowment, a growing audience and a bigger appetite for innovation.
Efficiencies, however, have been harder to come by. The number of executives on staff and the $21 million cost of running Vermont Public in 2024-2025 was largely unchanged from the year before the merger. Singh said health care cost increases and inflation have made it difficult to hold down overall expenses.
In fiscal year 2024-2025, tax filings show, investment returns on the endowment made up for a $4.7 million operating deficit. The year before, the organization ran about $4 million in the red. Stock market earnings covered the loss.
Board member Dibble said she is optimistic that the budget will shake out as the nonprofit finds its footing with new audiences.
The merger “allowed us to meet the future with more resources and more nimbleness,” she said. “The revenue is not matching the expenses with the organization right now, and that’s a reflection of those headwinds that we’ve known have been coming for a long time.”
While Singh is cautiously optimistic the nonprofit will continue to draw enough support to cover the federal funding gap, he worries that protest donations won’t last.
We have an ongoing hole in our budget that we need to make up, and we are trying to become more sustainable.
Vijay Singh
“We have an ongoing hole in our budget that we need to make up, and we are trying to become more sustainable,” he said.
In addition to boosting its membership and donor programs, Singh said Vermont Public is trying new fundraising strategies. For example, it has partnered with the vendor FreeWill to offer free assistance with estate planning to members — and an opportunity to leave a bequest for Vermont Public. About 200 people have or intend to leave part of their estates to Vermont Public, according to its website.
Meantime, in the wake of the 13 layoffs in July and the elimination of two vacant positions, there’s been a spate of hiring. The total head count before the layoffs was 110; the stations now have 104 employees, Singh said.
On its website and on air, Vermont Public continued to plug the federal cuts as an existential crisis, emphasizing the potential loss of local and national news.
That ring of desperation frustrated McKone, the newspaper columnist. In a November column, he criticized Vermont Public for “its irritating, relentless requests for money that it has not shown it needs.”
McKone said Vermont Public’s “disingenuous, misleading statements about its finances in the wake of the federal cut announcements were shocking. Such behaviors are violations of the public trust, especially for a news organization, and disrespectful to us all.”
Singh defended the fundraising approach.
“I mean, I understand what the person is pointing out here,” he said. “But yeah, we have an ongoing hole in our budget that we need to make up, and we are trying to become more sustainable so that we can better strengthen the entire information ecosystem.” He added, “It’s how public media has always worked, and I don’t think that that’s really going to change, and maybe that’s not a satisfying answer, but that is the reality in front of us.”
Innovate or Die
In a state of about 645,000 people, Vermont Public says its monthly audience includes 295,000 online visitors; 385,000 video, streaming and television viewers; and 537,000 radio, live stream and podcast listeners each month.
Shifting demographics and platforms are major challenges. The average age of prime-time viewers for PBS stations is 72, according to Current, a public media industry publication. Younger people, meantime, are increasingly connected digitally. Competition for attention is not focused on the airwaves, but online — with streaming, podcasting and video.
In response to this trend, Vermont Public is producing more YouTube videos, as it seeks to integrate its broadcast and online assets. Singh said he is focused on getting “onto as many platforms as possible … for the folks who need to see the news that we’re producing but will never turn on a radio. We want to make sure that it’s discoverable for them as well and works with what their habits are.”
In order to achieve that goal, former board member Evslin said he believes Vermont Public needs to spend down a significant portion of its endowment to diversify its audience, accelerate the use of AI tools for reporters and boost its reach to people who are getting their news through other channels.
There is no obvious path forward, he said, for any news organization in an environment where audiences are fragmented and consumers are just as likely to get information from podcasters, news influencers and Substack bloggers as they are from legacy news outlets.
“The answer isn’t just to raise more money and get more reporters,” Evslin said. “They’ve got to use the tools that make resources more effective.”
Nationally and in Vermont, innovation could be a silver lining of the Congressional rescission, said Mike Janssen, a reporter for Current, the public media industry publication. “It feels like a defeat to lose the federal funding, but it also opens the door to new possibilities,” he said. “Federal funding may have encouraged forms of inefficiency in the system.”
For example, he said, “There’s been talk for years about how we need to have more collaborations, more regional partnerships, find ways to consolidate back-office operations, that kind of thing. And you know people would talk about it but not much of that happened. And now there’s a wake-up call.” ➆
The original print version of this article was headlined “Public Interest | Vermont Public is weathering federal cuts — so far. But it’s challenged by shifting trends in media engagement.”
Correction, February 25, 2026: A previous version of this story misstated the sequence of a fundraising milestone and layoffs at Vermont Public.
This article appears in The Media Issue • 2026.
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