A look into the operations of public media organizations who report on art and culture, the Nonprofit Media Coverage of the Arts in California: Challenges and Opportunities study was published by the California Arts Council on November 2, 2016. Artbound regular contributor Matt Stromberg authored the report. Below, read a breakdown of the key findings illustrated within it.
The field of journalism, especially arts journalism, is currently undergoing the greatest transformation it has seen since perhaps the invention of moveable type. More people than ever are enjoying a wider selection of content on multiple platforms, but the financial models that have supported the countless writers, photographers, and producers who create that content are facing a major disruption. These changes affect commercial and nonprofit media alike. A report released earlier this week by the California Arts Council, Nonprofit Media Coverage of the Arts in California: Challenges and Opportunities, aims to take stock of both the current issues and favorable factors facing nonprofit media coverage of the arts, and delivers recommendations for how funders can better serve this dynamic field.
In 2013, the California Arts Council, a state agency that provides grants for arts-related nonprofits throughout the state, created the Arts on the Air grants program. Intended to support nonprofit television and radio coverage of the arts, the program ran for two years, investing $350,000 overall, with awards ranging from $28,000 to $75,000 being given to seven grantees including KQED in San Francisco, KCET in Los Angeles, and Radio Biling e in Fresno. Despite the program's successes, the council decided that it was not serving the field as best it could, based on feedback from applicants and peer review panelists. One issue was the way impact was measured, which tended to favor larger stations with more robust audience numbers, not taking into account the strong role that smaller stations can play in their communities. In addition, the plethora of ways that audiences now consume media further complicates attempts to gauge audience engagement. In response to these concerns, the council chose to suspend the program in 2015.
KCET Artbounds documentary Artesanos/Artisans uncovers the stories of Mexican artisans whose labor serves as the backbone of high-end design and retail in Los Angeles.
In June of 2016, the council convened at a daylong summit in the headquarters of Youth Radio in Oakland, inviting more than a dozen participants from a wide array of public media organizations to discuss the current state of public media and the arts in California. The results of this summit, along with additional research and interviews with funders, were published in the Nonprofit Media Coverage of the Arts in California: Challenges and Opportunities report. The study outlines key findings before going on to suggest recommendations for ways to more effectively serve the field. After reviewing the report, the council voted in September in favor of renewing an arts and public media program, with a commitment to invest $200,000. The revamped program is slated to start in 2017.
The findings published in the report included the aforementioned problems with quantifying audience data, the different challenges faced by rural and urban environments, and small and large stations, and the needs met by nonprofit media sources that are neglected by their commercial counterparts. We are finding stories that may have been lost otherwise, noted KVIE arts producer Marinda Johnson in the report.
Dublabs Creative Cultivation Fundraiser Salon, April 2015. | Photo: dublabrat [Yoshihiro Makino]/Flickr/Creative Commons License
Another notable finding was the role that public events can play in deepening engagement with communities beyond on-air programming. We've done so many events that they in some way have eclipsed out radio programming, said Alejandro Cohen, director of online radio station Dublab. Events are the perfect way to bring your online presence to audiences.
The emergence of new platforms was a significant topic discussed at the summit as well. In addition to television and radio broadcasts, most stations have programs available on their websites, and increasingly on social media sites like Facebook. Additionally, Facebook was more often cited as the primary platform that drives traffic to webpages and where content is increasingly consumed, therefore producers are creating programming specifically for it. The irony of a commercial company hosting public media was not lost on summit attendees. Facebook is a private company that makes its money off ad sales and clicks, said USC professor of communications Josh Kun. What was a disruptive economy is now a new version of an old school media monopoly.
A KCET Facebook post promotes that multimedia series Tending the Wild is streamable on various platforms including Apple TV and Roku. The show was produced in partnership with the Autry Museum of the American West.
Also discussed was the important role that partnerships can play for nonprofit media stations. These include both content sharing and mentorship partnerships between stations, as well as those between media outlets and different kinds of arts organizations, such as museums, symphonies, or performing arts centers. It's a win-win situation, said Juan Devis, KCET's chief content officer, because they get the benefit of our audience and our broadcast, and we get the benefit of having access to content and to a project that otherwise we would not have been involved in.
In addition to these findings, the report made a series of recommendations regarding ways in which funders can best support the field in the future. These include:
--
--
Develop new methods for measuring success.
Sheer audience size
Most recent headlines
06/10/2025
France T l visions, France's leading broadcaster, has received the 2025 EBU ...
04/09/2025
Monumental Sports & Entertainment (MSE), in collaboration with Dalet, has been a...
30/08/2025
WASHINGTON The Federal Communications Commission has adopted its FY 2025 Regulatory Fees Order that establishes the regulatory fee rates for the broadcast stati...
29/08/2025
Australian Red Cross and SBS launch training to help workplaces in the fight aga...
29/08/2025
The National Film and Video Foundation (NFVF), an agency of the Department of Sp...
29/08/2025
L3Harris Technologies has concentrated decades of expertise across the entire enterprise to develop affordable and reliable best-of-breed solutions to rapidly c...
29/08/2025
BURBANK, Calif. The CW Network and the Pac-12 Conference have announced a new media rights deal that will extend their broadcast partnership beginning with the ...
29/08/2025
NEW YORK Gracenote has released a new analysis of its global video dataset showing that the number of FAST channels grew nearly 14% from Q1 2025 and 76% since 2...
29/08/2025
SAN JOSE, Calif. Harmonic has announced a series of improvements to its live sports streaming solution that the company said will improve fan engagement, protec...
29/08/2025
NEW YORK and LOS ANGELES Fox Corp. and YouTube TV last night announced a renewal of the full portfolio of Fox networks, including Fox News Channel, Fox Business...
29/08/2025
Budapest, Hungary, August 2025 - The integration of Microsoft Teams Rooms (MTR) with Lightware's Taurus universal matrix switchers delivers a new level of f...
29/08/2025
Frequency, the engine behind many of the world's best-known streaming television channels, today announced it will launch Studio Live, a next-generation uni...
29/08/2025
In an era when AI and cyber resilience are essential, Scality will mark the 10th anniversary of Scality Day on October 16, 2025 in Paris. This flagship global e...
29/08/2025
Disguise's In-House Creative and Technical Teams Pre-Visualised, Programmed and Delivered Content for the Experience, All Powered by EX 3+
Technology solu...
29/08/2025
Disguise will be demonstrating the latest workflows for TV, film and live events on a number of partner booths at the show
Disguise, the industry-leading tech...
29/08/2025
STOCKHOLM, Sweden Accedo will showcase Accedo Compose, its AI agent-powered modular orchestration layer that assists streaming providers in transitioning client...
29/08/2025
LOS ANGELES Cineverse has announced that it is working with Xperi to bring four of its streaming channels to automobiles for the first time as part of the DTS A...
29/08/2025
DALLAS & ATLANTA Gray Media has announced an agreement with the sports streaming service Victory+ to simulcast 17 Dallas Stars NHL games in 15 television market...
29/08/2025
NEW YORK AND CULVER CITY Comcast NBCUniversal and Amazon have announced new and extended distribution agreements that will expand the content available on their...
29/08/2025
FOOTHILL RANCH, Calif. RED Digital Cinema will feature its Cine-Broadcast Module supporting live broadcast workflows during IBC2025, Sept. 12-15, at the RAI Ams...
29/08/2025
29 Aug 2025
Kyivstar Rings Opening Bell at Nasdaq Marking Landmark Listing and ...
29/08/2025
More than half of all NFL games live on Sky for the first timeFriday 29 August 2025
Sky Sports has announced a new three-year deal with the NFL, extending its ...
29/08/2025
Back to All News
RIV4LRIES: The Trailer of the New Series With Samuele Carrino ...
29/08/2025
Get ready for an inspiring and emotional insight into the world of competitive Irish dancing with My Story: Tomi Champion of the World airing on RT 2 this monda...
29/08/2025
RT has today announced that David McCullagh is to be the new presenter of RT Radio 1's flagship Today programme, which airs every weekday at 10am, replaci...
28/08/2025
By Kristin Feeley, Director, Documentary Film & Artist Programs
If you want to tell untold stories, if you want to give voice to the voiceless, you've got ...
28/08/2025
Directed by Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert, Sundance Institute-supported Amer...
28/08/2025
Corridos have been a cornerstone of M sica Mexicana for generations, telling stories rooted in everyday life. Now, a new chapter is taking shape: motivational c...
28/08/2025
Los corridos han sido un pilar de la M sica Mexicana durante generaciones, contando historias enraizadas en la vida cotidiana. Ahora, un nuevo cap tulo est tom...
28/08/2025
Earlier this month, we promised our Verano Forever party would bring the heat, a...
28/08/2025
L3Harris will provide the Polish F-16V fleet with the Viper Shield electronic warfare system as part of an upgrade program....
28/08/2025
Bilbao, August 26, 2025 - AgileTV, an international television and video technol...
28/08/2025
Ken Wilkinson is an Emmy Awards nominated New York audio engineer who specialises in production sound mixing for film, commercial, episodic and documentary work...
28/08/2025
NEW YORK FuboTV today announced that it will launch Fubo Sports, a skinny bundle that focuses on sports with a subscription price of $56 monthly....
28/08/2025
NEVADA City, Calif. At IBC2025, Sept. 12-15 at the RAI Amsterdam, Telestream will debut its new Global Ingest strategy, introducing a next-generation ingest arc...
28/08/2025
Dr. Rhoda Bernard Releases Groundbreaking Debut Book on Accessible Arts Educatio...
28/08/2025
TAG Video Systems, the leader in software-based IP end-to-end workflow monitoring, deep probing, and real-time visualization, has named Oliver Gappa as Sales Di...
28/08/2025
AI-based voice enhancement will be among a series of innovations making their IBC 2025 debut on the DHD stand B46 in Hall 8 at the RAI Amsterdam Convention Cent...
28/08/2025
Telef nica Servicios Audiovisuales (TSA), the leading system integrator and service provider in the media sector in Spain, with the support of Appear, the globa...
28/08/2025
To fully immerse sailing fans in the world's biggest offshore yacht race, production company, Optical Media turned to LiveU's On-site Production solutio...
28/08/2025
Working with Calrec on its most recent overhaul, radio and television broadcaster, WNED has migrated to a fully IP infrastructure with multiple Type R consoles,...
28/08/2025
Cleeng, the Subscriber Retention Management (SRM ) inventor, has unveiled Cleeng Pro, the first-ever direct-to-consumer (D2C) subscription management platform t...
28/08/2025
Zixi, the industry leader in live broadcast-quality video over IP, today announced that French media distribution platform OKAST has selected Zixi to enable rel...
28/08/2025
Solution offers a streamlined, speaker-free architecture to optimize integration with premium external loudspeakers and advanced loudness metering
Nixer Pro Au...
28/08/2025
Cinegy, the premier provider of software-defined television technology, has announced a strategic partnership with Vision One Touch Film Production Services L.L...
28/08/2025
Telestream, a global leader in media workflow technologies, will debut its new Global Ingest strategy at IBC2025, introducing a next-generation ingest architect...
28/08/2025
Tier 1 operator selects Broadpeak to power high-performance, unified CDN solution across Norway, Sweden and Finland
Broadpeak, a leader in streaming and moneti...
28/08/2025
Leading video software provider, Synamedia, today announced that 24 Frames Digital, one of India's leading live event streaming service providers, has chose...
28/08/2025
Meet VisualOn at IBC2025: See What's Next in AI-Powered Video Streaming Join VisualOn at IBC2025 and discover how our AI-driven Optimizer and advanced media...
A look into the operations of public media organizations who report on art and culture, the Nonprofit Media Coverage of the Arts in California: Challenges and Opportunities study was published by the California Arts Council on November 2, 2016. Artbound regular contributor Matt Stromberg authored the report. Below, read a breakdown of the key findings illustrated within it.
