Colorado Public Radio laid off 15 employees this week, marking the public broadcaster's largest pay cuts in at least a quarter century.
Employees were laid off on Tuesday and Wednesday, primarily in the audio and podcast production departments. The CPR newsroom, which has been responsible for much of CPR's growth since 2019, was spared the layoffs.
“We hate to see talented colleagues lose their jobs for financial reasons,” said CPR News Editor-in-Chief Kevin Dale. “CPR News has grown into a powerful news source over the past six years. Our mission has been and continues to be an emergency newsroom with time for corporate and accountability reporting. I will concentrate on that.”
Colorado Public Radio President and CEO Stewart Vanderwilt said he would not comment until after a full CPR staff meeting scheduled for Thursday morning. All employees affected by the layoffs were notified on Tuesday and Wednesday.
The cuts follow a period of unusual headcount growth, from 48 in the fiscal year ended 2006 to 214 in fiscal 2022, according to an examination of public tax documents.
Revenues have increased in recent years, but expenses have not kept pace. CPR states on its website that expenses exceeded his revenue by $1.3 million in fiscal year 2022 and $2.3 million in fiscal year 2023. Member donations continue to be strong, but corporate sponsorships have declined. Meanwhile, programming and fundraising costs increased by millions of dollars, driven in part by employee labor costs.
cardiopulmonary resuscitation newsCPR's budget crunch comes amid major changes in the way people consume audio news. The pandemic disrupted traffic and work patterns, impacting the audience for his Drivetime FM broadcasts. At the same time, podcasts from companies that had never produced talk radio before, such as The New York Times and Spotify, flooded the digital listening market and began competing for listeners.
NPR announced last year that it would lay off at least 100 people, or 10% of its workforce. A few months later, New York City public radio station WNYC announced it was cutting 12 percent of its workforce. And last month, NPR affiliate WAMU in Washington, D.C., laid off 15 staffers from local news site DCist.
These cuts to public radio followed years of cuts in newspapers, commercial radio, and television. It also comes after his decade in which CPR seemed to defy gravity by adding staff and investing in an expanding newsroom as Colorado's newsrooms shrunk. Announced. Headquartered in Centennial, CPR has built a statewide network with radio signals from Denver to Grand Junction to Colorado Springs.
Audience rankings grew rapidly throughout the 2010s as NPR's primary audience of educated professionals migrated to Colorado from the more expensive markets of California and New York. CPR's revenue more than doubled from fiscal year 2010 to fiscal year 2020, from $10.7 million to $23 million, according to tax records.
CPR's flagship show, Colorado Matters, doubled its airtime from 30 minutes to an hour and moved to the prime-time morning slot. The newsroom became one of Colorado's largest, with beat reporters covering education, climate change, health, politics and business.
Over the past five years, CPR has taken control of NPR station KRCC and its newsroom in Colorado Springs, and also acquired Denverite, an online news website focused on the city. In late 2019, CPR opened a newsroom in downtown Denver, where most of its 60 reporters, producers and hosts are located.
All of this has led to a breathtaking expansion for a station that began in 1970 as a student-run operation at the University of Denver and has spent most of its life with just a handful of employees and volunteers dedicated to public radio. .
Last year, CPR announced it had purchased a new headquarters at 777 Grant in Denver. The $8.34 million purchase was funded by a yet-to-be-disclosed donor. The building still requires extensive interior work for studios and offices. CPR estimated it would take him three years to complete the project.
This story was reported by Investigative Reporter Ben Marcus and edited by Investigative Editor Chuck Murphy. To avoid conflicts of interest, senior CPR News executives were not involved.
