NPR has received two of the largest gifts in the public media network's existence, totaling $113 million. They will go toward fueling innovation in NPR's use of digital technology, increasing its connection with audiences, and ensuring the viability of public radio stations after Congress eliminated all federal funding for public media.
NPR President and CEO Katherine Maher said the gifts would help to set up the network and its stations for the next 50 years, beyond the radio network infrastructure that sprang up in 1970 from a coalition of community and university-owned public radio stations across the country.
Maher said that requires NPR and its stations to use tech to collaborate more effectively in providing programs and news coverage, to analyze how people are consuming their offerings and to discern how to raise money more effectively to pay for it. She said the gifts would be "catalytic investments" in NPR's future.
"Audiences don't just listen in their cars or in their kitchens," Maher said. "They're reading, they're viewing, they're listening on the go."The donations would help answer a key question, Maher said: "How do we make sure that we have the infrastructure necessary to be able to deliver the high quality reporting to people in all those places when they want?"
The philanthropist Connie Ballmer contributed $80 million specifically toward ensuring NPR transforms its technology to meet the needs and serve the interests of public media audiences on whatever platforms or devices they may seek it.
"I support NPR because an informed public is the bedrock of our society, and democracy requires strong, independent journalism," Ballmer, a former member of the NPR Foundation board, said in a statement. "My hope is that this commitment provides the stability and the spark NPR needs to innovate boldly and strengthen its national network."
Ballmer and her husband, former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, have given away more than $3 billion in recent years, according to a joint interview they gave last year to the Chronicle of Philanthropy.
Another donor, who has elected to remain anonymous, has given NPR $33 million to build and acquire tools and services that will be shared with public media organizations across the nation. The network intends to aid stations in analyzing their audiences, marketing themselves, and raising money, among other things.
The gifts arrive at a time of great financial strain for public media.
End of federal funding
Last summer, under pressure from President Trump, the Republican-led Congress voted along party lines to claw back all $1.1 billion in federal funding that lawmakers and the president had already approved for public media. The move represented the shattering of a tradition of bipartisan support for public broadcasting stretching back more than a half-century.
The average public radio station lost about 10% of its annual budget; for public television stations and PBS, the figure stood closer to 15%. NPR itself lost about 1 to 2% of its annual budget with the end of federal dollars. The elimination of federal funds has forced widespread layoffs throughout the system.
Though NPR owns no stations, more than 240 public radio stations are full NPR News member stations and hundreds of others carry some of its content.
NPR moved to shore up station finances by easing the fees it charges them to carry its major news programs, such as Morning Edition and All Things Considered, and to offer assistance in fund-raising, marketing, and other endeavors.
The gifts announced Thursday are the largest NPR has received since Joan B. Kroc, the widow of McDonald's magnate Ray Kroc, left more than $200 million to the network. That bequest, in 2003, elevated NPR's newsgathering capabilities, allowing it to open international bureaus and NPR West in Culver City, Calif. It also established a major endowment that has enabled it to weather a series of financial storms.
In 2018, former NPR CEO Jarl Mohn and his wife Pamela gave the network $10 million from the personal fortune he had made as a tech investor when he announced he would be stepping down from role running the network.
Questions remain about layoffs
Asked about concerns that NPR may still face layoffs to ease ongoing budget strains, Maher noted the contributions announced Thursday were intended for specific purposes, not to build the endowment or to expand news coverage. And, when asked, Maher did not rule out job cuts this year.
"This does not replace federal funding," Maher said. "This does not replace the shortfalls. We still need to continue to operate effectively in order to be able to do the work that we do day in and day out."
Several people within NPR said the network has been planning scenarios for alternative levels of job cuts, though no plans are currently set. Executives also are trying to figure out the degree to which the network could rely more heavily on reporters from local stations for national coverage, staffers said. (They spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly on internal matters.) The ability to do so could be complicated by two factors: the fact that covering the same story often requires a different emphasis for local audiences familiar with a subject, as opposed to a national audience; and the additional strain on local newsrooms, which are often quite small, as a result of the loss of federal funds.
The question of NPR's relationship to its stations was thrown into sharp relief during the Washington debate over federal funding. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which had dispensed federal dollars to public media outlets until its demise, had sought to withhold money from NPR last year for a satellite distribution service it provides local stations. A federal judge ruled that CPB officials were trying to distance themselves from NPR in an attempt to appease Trump. Ultimately, CPB paid the money.
In the wake of the loss of federal funds, some stations have decided to rely more heavily on NPR programming as they've been forced to cut their budgets for local news. Yet Maher says the local stations' journalism represents a competitive advantage for NPR.
"This has been my ambition for us as a network since I arrived,"
— said Maher, who became NPR's chief executive in early 2024 after a career spent mostly in the tech world, including as CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation. "My intent was for us to find ways to work together as a network, to be greater than the sum of our parts, so we were able to take advantage of our footprint... to tell stories that matter to the country from the places where that was occurring."
