Ten years ago, I left a dream job at NPR because I was worried about the public radio system’s digital transition — and whether it could survive as a publicly supported service in an increasingly partisan world.

Today, the shit has hit the fan.

The broadcast audience is shrinking. Membership is flat or falling. Sponsorship has peaked. Federal support is gone. And it’s not just public media. The entire media ecosystem now orbits YouTube, Instagram, Spotify, and TikTok — platforms with infinite content and little to no sense of responsibility for what they amplify. AI is about to accelerate those dynamics a hundredfold.

It would be understandable to overlook public radio and TV as a place to build the next platform for civic information. Hell, I did. I left NPR for a podcast startup, co-founded a company, and wound up selling it to Google News. Now, after years inside the tech ecosystem, I spend my days working with public media stations again — trying to help them turn broadcast streams and podcast archives into “radio you can talk to.” And I’m more bullish on public media’s future than I’ve ever been.

The need for public-spirited news — rooted in place and grounded in trust — has never been greater. The question is whether we can build a digital civic news platform for the next fifty years, not just the next pledge drive.

I think the answer is yes, if public media leans into a new role:

• Treat journalism as an on-demand civic tool, and use new technologies to help people answer real questions about the places they live.
• Use stations as hubs in a wider network that stitches together national newsrooms, local outlets, and independent creators — instead of leaving that work to black-box algorithms.
• Build shared membership systems so that when audiences support one part of that network, their dollars can move — cleanly and transparently — to others.

Local public media stations might be some of the last institutions left standing with the ingredients to anchor this kind of durable, responsible digital network. They have brand trust, broadcast reach, membership systems, editorial standards, philanthropic relationships, community legitimacy, distribution channels rooted in communities — and, despite the headwinds, millions of paying members.

For decades, stations have been the connective tissue between communities and the larger world. In the Bay Area, KQED stitches together national reporting, local investigations, wildfire coverage, school board fights, and work from small nonprofits and independent producers. When public radio works best, program directors are not just schedulers; they are editors of a civic soundscape.

That function — editing and responsible curation — is exactly what the wider news ecosystem dominated by algorithms has lost. Stations should become hubs in a larger civic digital network, linking responsible creators, neighborhood outlets, and community-based reporting with the reach, trust, and membership infrastructure stations already operate. The system can leverage its strengths and meet audiences where they spend so much of their time: on their phones.

We’re already seeing glimpses of what a new public-spirited network could look like. Andrew Haeg at the Institute for Nonprofit News is building products to help local independent publishers share relevant work. David Gehring at the Distributed Media Lab and Tim Olson at KQED built a re-bundling experiment for California news sites. Partner sites can embed a curated stream of stories from trusted newsrooms; host sites kept their audiences, smaller publishers gain distribution, and KQED serves as editor of the bundle instead of ceding that role to a black-box algorithm.

Outside of public media, there are similar efforts. URL Media is building a decentralized network for high-performing Black and brown news organizations, sharing sponsorship and ad infrastructure. The Latino Media Content Hub delivers curated news from participating Latino independent outlets. Flaming Hydra recently brought 60 independent writers together to fight the “horrors of modern corporate publishing.” Imagine if public media’s millions of contributing members could choose to sample or support outlets like these as pledge-drive benefits — not instead of the tote bag, but alongside it.

Public media needs to embrace new technologies to wire these relationships into a genuinely public-spirited platform. Used well, AI and machine learning don’t replace reporting; they help surface the right reporting, with clear attribution, when someone in a community needs it.

Picture this: A listener in Richmond, northeast of San Francisco, wakes up, grabs her phone, and asks her station’s app: “Why does the air smell so bad?” A civic network anchored by KQED could, in seconds, pull together breaking news about the news about the local Chevron plant, a recent clean-air investigation from Richmondside, a report from Public Health Watch on big oil’s effort to roll back state regulations, a political explainer from KQED, and a national piece that puts it all in context.

This listener in Richmond wouldn’t be at the mercy of an opaque algorithm or stumbling across a pink slime site. She’d be plugged into a curated, fully attributed playlist of original reporting. Her feed would be shaped by where she lives and what she asked, strengthening the visibility and reach of each newsroom involved.

KQED is already working with our team at b-spoke.ai to turn its live stream into something searchable and navigable. The broadcast instantly becomes a usable archive you can interrogate in plain language. It will transform KQED’s journalism into an on-demand civic tool, giving people more ways to engage with reporting they trust.

Public radio stations can leverage the reach of their broadcast infrastructure to anchor a civic information network that serves communities across multiple platforms. In an era of infinite content and fragile institutions, sustainability will come from networks, not silos.

My optimistic prediction: Within the next decade, the strongest local news ecosystems will be built around public media hubs that connect independent creators, community outlets, national journalism, and shared membership systems — not around any single newsroom, and definitely not around a single app.

Stations that step into this role offer communities an alternative to platforms that shape news diets without any sense of civic responsibility. The lack of responsible digital platforms has created a vacuum. We’ve seen what this looks like. It’s not good.

Public media still has one irreplaceable asset: the trust of millions of people who believe we’re on their side. If stations like KQED use that trust to convene, re-bundle, and make the news truly interactive and usable in daily life, they won’t just save themselves and the public broadcasting system. They could help rebuild a functional public square, help restore civil dialogue so needed in the country now, help rebuild faith in democracy, and increase much-needed accountability in public life.