Why public radio and television stations should radically reorient toward digital-first local news, and how they could do it – Knight Foundation

I would want public media to be a widely-dispersed system of nonprofit, user-supported local news organizations specializing in public service journalism and publishing primarily online, primarily in text — in other words, a ProPublica in every city, made economically feasible by government subsidies.

Imagine that public broadcasting never happened in the United States — that the educational stations and networks never formed; that the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967 never passed; that NPR, PBS and all of their hundreds of member stations never existed. Now imagine that this year, in 2017, there was a sudden, national wave of interest in creating a new media system subsidized by taxpayer dollars. What would such a system look like?

Would it be network of television and…