Richmond public media better poised amid federal funding cuts
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While Richmond's public TV and radio stations are facing holes in their budgets after Congress gutted their federal funding, they're likely in a better position to weather the hits compared to others across the country.
Why it matters: The $1.1 billion in cuts to Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) funding will hit PBS and NPR member stations in Roanoke and Arlington far harder than it'll hit Richmond.
- That's based on data manually collected from station websites and shared with Axios by Alex Curley, a former NPR staffer who has been tracking public media financing on his blog, Semipublic.
- Curley's dataset is extensive, but incomplete.
By the numbers: Some of Virginia's public stations see higher shares of funding from CPB grants than the national average — about 10.3% for U.S. public TV stations as of fiscal 2023, and 4.1% for radio stations.
- 19.3% of funding for WBRA in Roanoke comes from CPB grants.
- It's 16.4% for WETA's TV station and 0.4% for its radio station in Arlington.
- It's 10.6% for WTJU (aka UVA's Community Radio Station).
Caveat: Public media stations can also receive other forms of federal grants, plus corporate sponsorships and donations from (ahem) viewers like you.
- But Curley writes: "CPB grants make up the majority of federal funding for most public media entities."
Zoom in: VPM, which owns the largest public radio and TV station in Richmond, gets 6–7% of its budget from federal funding, per the data and VPM.
- VPM has been especially well funded in recent years thanks to the nearly $182 million sale of its broadcast spectrum in Northern Virginia in 2017.
- Comparatively, VPM had posted $8.8 million in revenue for its previous fiscal year, Richmond Magazine reported. So that one sale brought in roughly 20 times its annual revenue.
Yes, but: That $182 million was put into a foundation, and has been spent on things like the $4.2 million plot for VPM's new, under-construction downtown headquarters, VPM reported.
Between the lines: Nationwide, public media stations in relatively populous, high-income cities tend to have better access to donors.
- But rural stations tend to be more reliant on federal dollars — while also serving key roles for local news and emergency broadcasts, including weather and AMBER alerts.
Zoom out: Richmond also has a higher share of local journalists compared to the nation at large.
- There are 20 area journos for every 100,000 people, according to the Local Journalist Index 2025 from Muck Rack and Rebuild Local News, a local journalism nonprofit.
- That's compared to the national average of 8.2 journalists for every 100,000 people.
- And Richmond has nearly as many reporters per capita as uber media-rich D.C., which has 22.5 journos for every 100,000 people.
Fun fact: With 14 reporters, VPM has among the largest news reporting staff in the Richmond region, per an Axios review of news staff directories.