WPSU, which recently celebrated its 60th anniversary of bringing public media to Pennsylvania, is slated to close soon, after a Penn State board of trustees committee voted unanimously Thursday against a proposal to transfer ownership of WPSU to WHYY.
The committee had been presented with a plan to transfer WPSU and its assets to the Philadelphia area public media station. The proposal included a total of $17 million in funding from Penn State over five years.
Penn State’s chief financial officer Sara Thorndike said if the board's finance committee rejected the plan, the university would develop a “wind down plan” for WPSU. She said WPSU will end on June 30, 2026, at the latest. Layoffs are expected.
Whether NPR and PBS programming will continue in WPSU's listening and viewing area was not immediately clear. WPSU-TV reaches 515,000 households in 24 counties of central Pennsylvania, and WPSU-FM serves more than 450,000 listeners in 13 counties in central and northern Pennsylvania.
Thorndike said the university has to be “clear-eyed” about the challenges it's facing in public broadcasting and in higher education.
Penn State had been providing WPSU with about $3.4 million a year.
“Continued long-term subsidy from tuition to support WPSU is no longer feasible, especially since the federal funding WPSU received of $1.8 million last year and the $1.3 million we expected this year was unfortunately reduced to zero from federal funding cuts for public broadcasting,” Thorndike said.
Congress approved canceling all federal funding to public media this year. And, WPSU saw a decrease in funding from Penn State. Together, those cuts equaled about a quarter of the station’s budget and led to a round of layoffs in June.
“As we all know we are facing a challenging landscape financially," Thorndike said. "Running WPSU has become increasingly expensive for Penn State."
She pointed to other challenges for universities, including uncertainty around research funding.
Penn State trustees raised questions about the plan to transfer ownership of WPSU to WHYY, including about the job uncertainty for WPSU employees and the cost of the transfer to Penn State.
WPSU will share more information about this decision and the impact as it becomes available.
