Ozarks Public Broadcasting accepts ‘bridge’ grant

Rachel Knight: Community support has grown this year.

A grant awarded to Ozarks Public Broadcasting is expected to stave off additional staffing and programming cuts, at least for now.

The public media outlet operated by Missouri State University – home to Ozarks Public Television and Ozarks Public Radio, or KSMU – lost $1.3 million in federal funding when the U.S. Congress rescinded $1.1 billion in federal funding for public media stations in mid-2025.

The annual funding, 33% of the television funding and 10% of radio funding, supported local programming, community outreach, acquisition of national content and station operations.

Rachel Knight, general manager for OPB, said the outlet cut spending while looking at ways to raise additional funds.

“When we looked at this $1.3 million loss in the first fiscal year we attacked it from both sides, and this is part of the revenue increase that has made it possible for us to limit our budget cuts,” Knight said. “Without this money, we would have had to cut more deeply into both programs and staff.”

The MSU Board of Governors voted March 18 to accept $678,524 from the Public Media Bridge Fund, a philanthropic effort to support stations that sustained a deep cut in federal funding.

“It’s for one year, and it’s potentially renewable, but the bridge fund will go through different stages,” Knight said. “This is sort of a stabilization round.”

In the weeks before the cut, OPB was projecting $4.8 million in expenses for fiscal year 2026.

Knight said expenses were cut by more than $500,000.

At the start of the fiscal year, she said OPB had “around 43 to 45 full-time equivalents” – full-time staff, part-time staff and student workers – and 7.2 positions were cut. She said full-time cuts were made through attrition, the process of not filling jobs after staffers resign or retire.

“There were some personnel cuts. There were some retirements that were scheduled to happen and some that might have happened a little sooner than anticipated,” said Brad Bodenhausen, vice president for community and global partnerships at MSU. “We have seen an increase in local gifts and upgrades to contributions, a lot of local support, and found some operational effectiveness in looking at how TV, radio and digital can combine.”

OPB had to “make some changes that listeners could hear and OPT viewers could see,” Knight said.

Knight said changes were made to weekend radio programming, including the loss of the TED Radio Hour. For OPT, the OzarksWatch Video Magazine, a broadcast highlighting local history, was placed on hiatus.

“We’ll continue to air those programs but, for the time being, we’re not producing the program,” she said.

One of the biggest changes was to stop mailing out a monthly programming guide to members.

“Our full schedule is available online,” she said. “Then we have moved to sending out that program guide digitally via email to our members, so people are still getting it.”

Knight said diversified funding, and its relationship with MSU, has been a strength.

“We’ve always received the biggest part of our funding from our community, and that share has only grown,” she said. “We do receive money from the state of Missouri, a little bit, and we get some direct support from the university and then local businesses.”

She said viewers and listeners have stepped up their support in significant ways.

“If you look at membership contributions, we were expecting to raise something like $1.7 million from our community in individual contributions in FY26, and we’ve raised about $1 million more than that,” she said.

“It has been incredibly moving to see the support for public media in our community, and it’s making all the difference in this time.”

Knight said the increase in local funding and the bridge gap funding provide critical short-term help, but long-term solutions are still needed.

“What we lost was not a one-time contribution of $1.3 million. It’s annual funding of $1.3 million, so this continues to be a challenge for us,” she said.

OPB has been able to access the first $400,000 of the $678,524 bridge grant and, post-vote, will be able to draw down the rest. Funding can only be used for public media operations.

Knight said stations that are licensed to community boards, instead of a university, may have a tougher time figuring out how to cover operating costs.

“The fact that we’re jointly licensed to a university and have been operating with fiscal responsibility for decades has brought us to a moment where we’re facing this extraordinary challenge in a much healthier place than so many stations across the country,” she said.