With federal funding gone, WXXI undergoing reinvention

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As WXXI Public Media deals with federal funding cuts and changing consumer habits, president and CEO Chris Hastings believes the multifaceted nonprofit organization must go back to its roots in order to move forward.

The five television stations and six radio signals will continue to inform and entertain, as will the organization’s two other ventures, for-profit CITY magazine and the 501(c)(3) nonprofit The Little Theatre.

They will do so, however, without their annual allotment of $1.9 million — about 15 percent of the WXXI budget — from the Corporation of Public Broadcasting. That federal funding was eliminated by the Trump administration in July and public donations can only go so far.

So it’s back to the future.

“I feel pretty confident that this is an opportunity for us to reinvent ourselves and serve in new ways that are more sustainable without federal funding for the moment,” Hastings said. “When we think about what WXXI is to Rochester, I look at who we are, the hub of the creative economy of Rochester.”

Hastings intends to leverage WXXI’s position and brand by providing production services to creatives that will bring in revenue.

“When I look at everything we’ve done in the past 60 years, we’ve always been a bit of a production studio; we’ve always produced content,” he said. “People know us for the stations but they also know us for the productions. While we’ve had federal funding for 50 years, we’re older than that and we’re going to go back to our roots, we’re really going to partner with the creative economy here and really build up our production capacity.

“We’re going to treat ourselves a little more as a business. We’re always going to be a nonprofit; public media is always going to be part of our mission and we’re going to continue to serve our community with our content. But how we produce it is really going to be a mix of things. We’re going to build some new revenue streams out of the idea that WXXI is a studio first and that studio has the opportunity to be a forward-facing business.”

Hastings took the reins at WXXI in November of 2024, arriving after a 20-year stint at WGBH, Boston’s public media giant. He succeeded Norm Silverstein, who guided the WXXI organization for nearly 29 years.

He was well aware there would be challenges. When Donald Trump was re-elected president, the threat of cuts to public broadcasting funding again became very real. After all, the idea had been considered during his first term as president. That’s why Hastings was working on a WXXI future those federal dollars before the cuts became official.

“To those who have been listening to and watching us, we had been talking about this long before the cut happened in July,” he said. “Our community heard us. Our strategic plan in the community is always a big part of why we do what we do, but it’s also a big part of our revenue stream. We really took it to the community and they came back with some additional funding through their donations and in becoming sustaining members.”

The public, however, can’t make up the entire difference. So Hastings is considering other ways to provide value for supporters.

“I’m looking for the community to look at us differently, to invest in us in different ways,” he said. “Maybe membership’s not for you, maybe you come on board as an equity investor. If you really like The Little, maybe we come up with a way for you to get naming rights in a place where we bring you the best movies every weekend.”

Hastings also intends to get creative with creatives while maintaining the organization’s principles.

“We’re really going to work hard on our core disciplines, which are music, news and education, to go after some restricted grants for the things that we do well here,” he said. “We’re going to partner with other public media stations in the state and in the nation to see if there are things we can do for them that they might want to pay us for.

“And we’re really going to be innovative with the resources we have in Rochester. We have some really talented creatives that we’ve been partnering with, we have some institutions that we have been partnering with, and we have some connections with people who want to make media.”

They’ve already taken a test drive to see what such partnerships would look like. Back on Sept. 30, International Podcast Day, WXXI partnered with WDKX radio personality Jazzy T (Jazz Williams) for a recording blitz. Williams operates her own podcast company, JazzCast Pros and wanted to use the WXXI studios to record eight different podcasts, Hastings said.

“Literally, in one day, we recorded (her) eight podcasts and a ninth, our show Connections,” Hastings said. “Now, we didn’t go into it thinking how we could have monetized that, but the experiment showed to me that you had this talented, young creator with an independent company who would be willing to pay us to use our studio to record podcasts.

“Now, what would that look like if we helped her distribute it? What would it look like if we helped her build ads around her podcasts? What would it look like if we used her model and produced more podcasts?”

Getting in on the action makes more sense to Hastings than letting losing audience share and getting nothing in return.

“Our biggest competitor isn’t necessarily other brands in the city, it’s individual creators who are posting to YouTube and Instagram every day,” Hastings said. “But our value-add to working with them and possibly splitting revenue with them is that we have a trusted brand.”

CITY and The Little Theatre both climbed out of the red in the most recent fiscal year. Hastings said their ability to break even is a positive sign for the future. But right-sizing staffing within the entire organization will be necessary. Positions will be eliminated, though he didn’t provide specifics.

The reinvention of WXXI will lead to a stronger organization, he said.

“As I look at us in the next six to 12 to 18 months, I see us being a healthy studio based in Rochester that’s able to sustain itself by going back to its roots and being a producer,” Hastings said.

That’s because he believes society still craves information, and trusted information in particular.

“What’s happening in America is people are consuming digital media at an incredible rate,” Hastings said. “They may not be watching as much broadcast TV or listening to broadcast radio, but audiences, even in this region, the way they are getting their information is increasingly coming through podcasts and digital media like YouTube and Instagram.

“We just need to figure out how our trusted brand lives in those spaces and we need to monetize what we do on those platforms. Underneath our studio we have CITY magazine, which is beloved for 50 years. We have the Little, which has been here for 100 years and is beloved in this community. How do we leverage that in the digital space and make more revenue. That is the challenge.”

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