Astoria’s KMUN, a local community radio station, is restructuring its broadcast programming after federal cuts erased 20% of the station’s budget.

“We lost our Corporation for Public Broadcasting funding this summer through the rescission process,” said Jack Harris, KMUN program director. “That money was allocated to us in the 2024 budget through Congress — when the (federal) administration changed, they decided they didn’t want to pay that money.”

In July, Congress revoked $1 billion in funding for CPB, at the behest of President Donald Trump. Harris said the station had already budgeted that money for the next two years. The cuts to the station are severe.

“It is $170,000 just this year,” Harris said. In a “hope for the best, expect the worst” spirit, KMUN began to look for ways to cut costs even before the rescission was officially passed. “We saw this coming; we kept hoping against hope that somehow it’d get derailed, and we’d get our money and it would work out,” Harris said.

Goodbye NPR

With the exception of staff, the top line item at KMUN was its approximately $80,000 annual National Public Radio membership fee — as such, it was the first to go.

“(NPR) was about 30-35 hours of programming per week, and that includes some music shows, ‘Fresh Air,’ ‘Wait Wait … Don’t Tell Me,’ ‘The Morning Edition’s,’ ‘All Things Considered,’ etc.” Harris said.

For the past month, KMUN has been “trying new things” to fill the empty space, Harris said. This includes repeating music from the previous day for certain slots and putting a callout for programmers who left during COVID to come back. The station will also pull more content from subscriptions it already has.

“WNYC (was) an underutilized asset that we were already paying for,” Harris said. “They have a base rate and then you can use anything they got — we’re going to have ‘On the Media,’ ‘Radio Lab,’ ‘Freakonomics,’ ‘The Ezra Klein Show’ and ‘Science Friday.’”

However, Harris said, “most of the NPR stuff is getting replaced by music.”

The station is also in talks to get a half hour of the international news from the British Broadcasting Corporation through 2027, free of charge.

Harris said that overall, KMUN will make it through the cuts, faring far better than other stations.

“They’re guessing a third of stations like ours are just not going to survive this,” Harris said. “It was 20% of our budget, but (for) some stations it’s 50-70-80% of their budget. A lot of stations just have one employee, and if they can’t afford to pay them; they can’t broadcast.”

Katie Frankowitz, KMUN’s news director, said that while the cuts mean more space for her to fill, it also presents an opportunity.

“It’s going to increase the amount of time that we have to play news, so we will be adding a little bit more news stories, most likely,” Frankowitz said.

Under the station’s current arrangement with NPR, it can only interrupt the one-hour NPR broadcast in particular snippets.

“Instead of being bound by those tiny sections here and there scattered throughout the NPR newscast, we’re going to have a lot more flexibility on how long certain things run,” Frankowitz said.

Frankowitz said being able to have all the local and regional news in one spot, instead of interspersing it with national NPR news, means that “listeners are going to have a more cohesive experience.”

According to Frankowitz, the first half hour of the news program will come from a partner station, either BBC or another organization. And then, “starting at 8:30 a.m. and running to 8:59 a.m., there is going to be local and regional news, and the Ship Report.” The Ship Report will last approximately 10 minutes, about the same length as usual, but Frankowitz will have to increase local and regional news from 11 minutes to 19 minutes. She says this will allow her to provide more in-depth Q&A interview segments and maybe even try out new ideas like providing information on upcoming government meetings.

“I think there’s a role for us in civic education and information, and making it so you can decide which meeting you want to attend,” Frankowitz said. “I am looking forward to it in terms of hopefully providing more and more useful content to listeners.”

One reporter

But at the end of the day, Frankowitz knows there is only so much she can do.

“I am still the only reporter that we have,” she said. “So some of it is me maybe being a little delusional about what we’re going to be able to accomplish … but I don’t think so; I think it’s going to be good.”

Harris said the station will officially lose its NPR content on Oct. 1, but in the meantime, they have been experimenting with phasing it out.

“It’s not very practical to change stuff overnight,” he said. “I didn’t want everyone to wake up on Oct. 1 and have a whole new radio station.”

Harris said overall, he thinks the team at KMUN has been handling the situation pretty well.

“I think we all have a pretty positive attitude about this,” Harris said. “As far as shaking our fists at the powers that be … we haven’t done much of that. I’ve been treating it kind of like the weather; it’s just the conditions we have to operate under.”

$80,000 hole

Even with cutting NPR programming, Harris said the station is still facing a “gaping $80,000 hole” in its budget. This year, the station was able to fill that hole through public fundraising efforts — but in the years to come, Harris said he’s not sure they can rely on that.

“Just because we’re losing NPR doesn’t mean we’re out of the weeds. We had a great response from people right after the rescission. A lot of people donated to try and backfill that,” Harris said. “I don’t believe it’s going to be sustainable to keep leaning into the politics of it and CPB being shut down as a reason to keep raising money.”

However, Harris said he believes the station will survive because there is a need for it in the community.

“The thing that has always made us popular in the community — none of that has changed,” Harris said. “I’m fine with people switching channels, but they’ll come back for the great hosts, the music, and the news that they can’t get anywhere else.”

Local KMUN listener Ken Dell said he was not aware that the federal cuts would impact KMUN.

“I am aware of cuts, but nothing of cuts at KMUN,” Dell said. “I like to listen (to the station) at midnight on Sundays.”

Dell said that time is when his programmer of choice plays Beatles music.