How Nine PBS is surviving, and even thriving, without federal funding  

Last May, Nine PBS experienced the kind of seismic shock that every nonprofit organization dreads—but few are ever prepared for. It lost 13 percent of its annual revenue overnight, with the stroke of a presidential pen.

Yet what’s happened in St. Louis since the Trump administration eliminated funding for public media is perhaps even more remarkable. Unlike other PBS stations, Nine hasn’t had to cut back programming or make significant layoffs. It’s sailing into its biggest fundraiser of the year tonight—its annual live broadcast of Donnybrook at Sheldon Concert Hall—with $24 million pledged towards a $42 million capital campaign. Nine PBS CEO Amy Shaw credits years of support from the community for preparing the station for what she calls “an extraordinary year, even if it’s been really bumpy.” 

But as Shaw points out in a new episode of The 314 Podcast, “really bumpy” is nothing new for the 71-year-old public television station. Just look at her journey as its CEO. The station’s longtime leader, Jack Galmiche, died unexpectedly at age 71 in 2019 (coincidentally, that happened seven years ago today). Shaw became acting CEO even as the board kicked off a national search. “I was basically in a very public job interview  every day,” she recalls. 

Ten months later, they offered Shaw the job. The offer came just four days after she broke her shoulder in eight places while traveling. And that was in February 2020, which meant just one month later, the station—and all of America—would be grappling with work-from-home orders. 

And then, as America was finally digging itself out of the pandemic, longstanding threats to pull federal funding became a sudden reality. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting dissolved, and while a judge later found Trump’s targeting of PBS and NPR was unconstitutional, it was at best a moral victory. With Congress aligned with the funding cuts, Shaw has no expectation of federal dollars coming back any time soon.

“It’s been something every year,” Shaw says. “But also it turns out Nine PBS and I are really good in storms, and we’re good at making lemonade out of moldy lemons.”

For that, Shaw credits years of being conservative fiscally, shoring up what she characterizes as once shaky finances.  ”Financially, if this had been 10 years ago and we lost the federal funding, which for us was $1.8 million, we could have been in a dire place,” she says. “It would’ve been really catastrophic. Whereas we’ve been preparing and working into financial security for the last seven years, so it was not catastrophic. We prepared ourselves to lose that $1.8 million.” 

And that, she says, was possible because of “an outpouring” of support from the community, which has made Nine PBS the most watched public television station in the U.S. for five of the last six years. (That’s as a percentage of households watching TV, which allows St. Louis to compete on an even field with bigger markets.) 

“I think St. Louisans are deeply supportive of the things they believe in, so I’m grateful that Nine PBS is one of those,” she says. “I also think we do right by the St. Louis community, so we figure out our broadcast schedule based on how we know people are watching, what we know they want, and we really listen.”

For Shaw, Sunday nights remain her time for TV watching. She grew up watching what is now Nine PBS with her parents—European soccer with her dad after mass on Sundays and, in the evenings, Masterpiece Theatre with both parents. The Masterpiece tradition is one she carries on to this day.

There was a brief time in her childhood when her parents experimented with a new mode of television. “When I was a sophomore in high school, we got cable,” Shaw recalls. “Which was so glorious. And then my dad, after six months said, this is not a good investment. And so back to PBS.” 

These days, Shaw is looking forward to the three episodes of Antiques Roadshow that were filmed in St. Louis last spring and are now set to broadcast on April 27, May 4, and May 11. It’s not just that it’ll be fun to see Grant’s Farm on the big screen. It’s that the taping offers yet more proof of how much public television is a force in St. Louis.

 ”Of the five cities where Antiques Roadshow taped last year, St. Louis had the most number of tickets requested,” Shaw boasts. Around 20,000 people wanted to come, when there were only 3,500 tickets. Says the proud CEO, “That’s more by multiples than any other city in the United States.” 

Editor’s note: The author is a regular panelist on Nine PBS’ Donnybrook.