Introducing Adopt A Station's Community Impact Tags
In honor of the official launch of our nonprofit, we're announcing the addition of six new tags to station listings based on our own research.
Almost one year ago, the idea for Adopt A Station was born out of a group chat among former public media workers. Congress had just voted to rescind the next two years of public media’s federal funding and we were trying to figure out what to do next. It was clear, from both outside reporting and Semipublic’s own research, that certain public media stations were much more at risk of immediately closing than others.
“What if you could just adopt a station that was at risk of closing?” somebody asked.
Out of that group chat, I took the station financial data I’d already gathered and over the next 24 hours created the site almost exactly as it exists today: Station cards that show how much of their revenue would be lost by the federal funding cuts as well as a rotating section that suggests an at-risk station at random. Finally, on the morning of Sunday, July 20th, 2025, I hit publish on the site and immediately hopped into the car to start a week-long vacation.
After that, Adopt A Station became something much bigger than any of us expected. Almost immediately, the site was slammed with visitors and we started getting attention from the press. Major donors and philanthropies began passing around the site’s information to help them direct aid to stations that were most at risk. And of course, John Oliver’s team decided to feature Adopt A Station in their show’s season finale in November.
One year later, the site has had 100,000 visitors and directly influenced hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations to stations (and this is a conservative estimate based on what stations have reported to us, we don’t track visitors once they leave the site). It’s also allowed Semipublic to transform from a newsletter into something much bigger.
Today, we’re proud to officially launch Semipublic as a research nonprofit. Our focus is on the nonprofit journalism industry, especially public media following the end of federal funding. Our mission: “Building trust in media through data.”
We are grateful to partner with the Tiny News Collective, who supports Semipublic as our 501(c)(3) fiscal sponsor.
We’re celebrating in several ways - a new logo, a new website, new homes for our newsletter, layoffs tracker, and jobs website - but the biggest is with the introduction of Community Impact Tags in Adopt A Station.
Community Impact Tags
As our analysis from early 2025 showed, the consequences of defunding public media have not been evenly distributed. Stations serving Native American communities were among the hardest hit — KSHI on the Zuni Pueblo in New Mexico lost 96% of its federal revenue, while stations across Alaska lost an average of more than 30% of their annual budgets. HBCU-affiliated and community stations similarly face structural funding challenges that existed before the rescission vote and that have since compounded.
Thankfully, donors of all types have recognized this imbalance and are actively seeking ways to identify more stations based on these characteristics and others like them.
Beginning today, station listings on AdoptAStation.org will display new tags drawn from station research compiled by Semipublic over the past several months:
HBCU, Rural, Native Audience, and Music are all static tags, drawn from categorical or membership data such as program format or membership in a specific industry group.
Local Journalism Leader and Local Programming Leader, however, are calculated using real-time station data compiled in Semipublic’s proprietary dataset - the most comprehensive and up-to-date independent database of public media station information in the United States. Each station’s weekly published local journalism, as well as its weekly locally-produced programming, is measured and divided by that station’s revenue. Stations are then ranked by this calculation and each tag is applied to the top 50%.
These aren’t perfect indicators - dividing by revenue tends to favor smaller stations - but we believe that the addition of these six tags advances the site’s original mission of connecting donors to at-risk stations.
We’re also excited to make Adopt A Station one of the only websites of its kind to utilize research data at this depth and scope to help connect donors to stations.
Get Involved
This is an exciting day for us as we push the boundaries of what’s possible for consumer-facing donation tools. There’s no doubt that our Community Impact Tags will evolve and improve from today on. We’re just getting started.
In the meantime, here are a few things you can do if you’d like to get involved:
Find your local station and adopt it: Explore our new categories and learn about the station that serves your community.
Support Semipublic: As you can imagine, research at this scale is expensive and time-consuming, and we’re already expanding on it. Your donation helps us shine a light on an industry that’s going through a profound transformation.
Subscribe to this newsletter: We publish interesting and impactful research and insights on this Substack often. You don’t want to miss it.
Thank you for being a part of our success. Here’s to another 100,000 visitors.