KQED to Slash Workforce by 15%, Cutting Dozens of Jobs in Latest Round of Layoffs

Updated at 6:15 p.m.

KQED announced Tuesday it’s laying off 45 people and losing 12 more who took voluntary departure offers, marking a 15% reduction in staff as the organization faces a significant budget shortfall and mounting financial uncertainty.

It’s the third round of layoffs in five years for one of the most-listened-to public radio stations in the country and comes as federal funding for public media is under threat.

The cuts impact every level of the organization, from top executives to custodial staff, but content-producing departments account for nearly three-quarters of them. KQED is disbanding its digital video team and slashing its education department, which produces media literacy curriculum, as part of a plan to sharpen its focus on local news and community events.

“In these uncertain times, the prudent, responsible thing to do is address what we have control over and to stabilize the organization so we can better navigate whatever challenges and uncertainty comes our way,” President and CEO Michael Isip said.

KQED is operating at a $12 million deficit in the current fiscal year. The reductions are expected to bring down the shortfall by about 90% going into next year, Isip said.

In addition to paring back its staff, the nonprofit said it will stop contributing to employees’ retirement accounts and freeze salary increases beginning this fall. The current plan is to restart both next year.

Leaders with the unions representing many of KQED’s workers said the company will have to negotiate before freezing pay for union members.

A spokesperson for the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA), which represents radio, digital news and podcast employees, said in a statement that the union is “committed to protecting the rights of our members in accordance with our collective bargaining agreements and ensuring that those impacted are treated fairly and equitably.”

The cuts whittle KQED’s workforce to 312, down from 369 full-time employees. An additional 10 vacant positions will go unfilled.

Four senior leaders are among those leaving the company, including Chief Operations and Administrative Officer Maria Miller and Chief Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Officer Eric Abrams. Isip said they were “mutual agreements that this was a good time for them to transition,” and he added that Abrams’ departure was not a response to pressure from the Trump administration to roll back DEI initiatives.

Petrice Gaskin, KQED’s director of mid-level giving who worked with Abrams as co-chair of the organization’s DEI council, lamented the optics of losing him in this climate. “At the same time, we acknowledge that this is a tough time period for everyone,” she said, “we’re really fighting for survival here.”

She credited Abrams with building a healthier culture at KQED, in part by making space to navigate difficult conversations. “KQED as a whole, people want to be nice and kind, but sometimes being nice gets in the way of addressing difficult topics that have to be unpacked that aren’t nice,” she said.

‘Devastating’ cuts to some teams

KQED’s education department is among those hardest hit; it’s losing eight of its 13 regular members. “It’s pretty devastating. The folks who we are losing … every single one of them has contributed to the success of our work in pretty significant ways,” said Michelle Parker, executive director of education.

The cuts mean listeners won’t hear as many young voices on the airwaves, and staff won’t see clusters of teens around the studio each year during Youth Takeover week, as the station is ending the eight-year-old tradition of giving swaths of airtime over to local youth once a year. The department will still help young people produce and publish media through the Youth Media Challenge showcase.

“We are still committed to youth voice, and we will still continue to do it in the best ways we can with the resources we have for as long as we are allowed to do that,” Parker said.

The small remaining team will provide fewer educator workshops and less curriculum development than in the past, but it will keep professional development courses for K–12 teachers available through the KQED Teach platform.

In dissolving its digital video team, the organization is focusing its online video offerings on expanding the audiences of existing shows and podcasts.

“We are really rethinking digital video,” Editor in Chief Ethan Toven-Lindsey said. “In terms of our local and news growth, it made sense for [the team] to be disbanded and to not have this separate, standalone unit, but to be integrated into different units.”

The station’s call-in radio show, Forum, already produces videos that stream on KQED’s website and YouTube, while its Political Breakdown podcast team is considering making its own video content. “That’s the map,” Toven-Lindsey said.

The digital video team’s work had centered on the often Emmy-lauded Deep Look and other resource-intensive programs. Now, just two members of the 13-person team will remain at KQED, with one of them reporting to newsroom leadership. A scaled-back version of Deep Look will live on.

Separate from the reductions, Chief Content Officer Holly Kernan left last month to become CEO of Nashville Public Radio. Rather than replace her, Isip named Toven-Lindsey editor in chief, a new position.

“It’s an indication that KQED’s future sustainability, our future strategy, our future growth — the backbone is local news,” Toven-Lindsey said.

Six of the staff cuts will come from the newsroom, including four layoffs and two people who took voluntary departure offers.

Sarah Augusta, who took the buyout offer after six years with KQED’s fundraising team, said she “decided to make a total right angle career switch” and open an independent bookstore in Martinez this fall.

While she said her team, which works with some of the organization’s largest donors, at times felt under-resourced, she added that “this place also attracts some of the most fascinating, interesting, creative people I’ve ever worked with.”

A volatile financial picture

The station has been running a board-approved deficit since 2022. Based on revenue projections at the time, leadership expected to get back in the black by fiscal year 2027, according to a KQED spokesperson. The timeline banked on revenue growth of 2.4% a year, but it’s only grown 1.3%.

Board chair Jennifer Cabalquinto said the broader economic situation has thrown those projections out the window. “The volatility is very real, and that’s really impacted the revenue sources,” she said, noting that the threat of losing federal funding compounds the picture. “It’s a double whammy.”

The Trump administration is working on multiple fronts to gut federal support for public media. The Senate faces a Friday deadline to decide whether to claw back $1.1 billion appropriated for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, a move already approved by the House of Representatives.

Last year, KQED received $7.6 million from CPB. If that’s pulled, Cabalquinto said the organization would likely rely on cash reserves in the short term.

Meanwhile, NPR and PBS are suing Trump to block an executive order that aims to cut off their federal funding, and the Federal Communications Commission is investigating the underwriting practices of local member stations — a move that Isip said has had “a chilling effect” among some corporate sponsors.

KQED’s financial troubles stem from the organization’s growth in recent years, driven by multimillion-dollar investments, and sluggish revenue growth can no longer support its size. But they are also indicative of the existential challenges bearing down on the nation’s public media system and news industry writ large.

New economic headwinds are contributing to a longstanding struggle to find financial footing in a digital environment.

“It wasn’t just one thing that’s causing this deficit, it’s multiple investments in growing our service,” Isip said.

Between 2013 and 2018, the nonprofit added 60 employees, mostly focused on digital services, according to Isip. During that period, the education department nearly tripled in size, he said, and the station added journalists, building among the largest nonprofit newsrooms in the country.

“We had to do that,” Isip said. “Broadcast audiences are declining. If we didn’t expand into new areas, that would threaten our future and our relevancy to our audiences moving forward.”

The growth was made possible in part by $45 million in one-time money from a fundraising campaign that also bankrolled a $94 million building renovation, and station leaders were betting that expanding services would boost the station’s audience, bringing an uptick in ongoing revenue to follow.

“That has been the case,” Isip said. “But our financial support has not grown at the same rate as our expense growth.”

Carrie Biggs-Adams, president of NABET Local 51, which represents the company’s radio and television engineers, among many other employees, voiced concerns about leaders’ management of KQED’s assets.

“It’s just stunning to have this happen in a place that had so much money a few years ago,” she said. Four NABET members are being laid off, according to Biggs-Adams.

Over the past eight years, KQED’s revenue has grown by 3.2%, while expenses have risen 4.7%, Isip said.

He blamed a number of factors, including the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. While individual donations from community members are strong — the May pledge drive brought in an annualized total of about $1.9 million, and the February drive brought in $2.3 million, the biggest since 2018 — corporate sponsorship and underwriting have “softened,” Isip said. Funding from foundations and grants is about flat, he added.

Last year, the company eliminated 34 positions amid other cuts, with leadership again citing rising costs and flagging expenses. In 2020, it laid off 20 employees.

This story was reported and written by KQED reporter Vanessa Rancaño and edited by KQED’s Jared Servantez. Under KQED’s standard practices for reporting on itself, no member of KQED management or its news executives reviewed this story before it was posted publicly.