After seven years of collaboration, GBH and New England Public Media are planning to formally merge by the summer of 2026, creating a statewide media organization expected to reach more than 1.3 million people across Massachusetts every week.
“This is all about preserving local news,” GBH President and CEO Susan Goldberg said in an interview. “So at a time when local news is endangered coast to coast, at a time when more than $1.1 billion has been taken away from local public media, what we’re doing by this is figuring out: How do we be as efficient as we can to make sure we preserve the most important things … we do? And local news, in terms of a forward- facing operation, is one of the most important things we do.
“This is about, How do we make sure those great stories in western Massachusetts have more scale and have more audience and can be seen by more people across the state?” Goldberg added. “The same is true with WCAI.”
New England Public Media, or NEPM, was created in 2019 as an affiliation between three entities: the GBH-owned television station WGBY; New England Public Radio, which was operating the station WFCR in Springfield for the University of Massachusetts; and UMass.
GBH technically took ownership of NEPM, but NEPM was constituted as its own nonprofit with its own fiduciary board and largely operated independently, even as GBH ran its human resources and finance operations.
Now, Goldberg said, the merger will result in even more collaboration in areas like sponsorships and public events, as well as cost-saving efficiencies stemming from consolidation. For example, NEPM and GBH will now be audited together rather than separately, and will file taxes as one entity rather than two. According to Goldberg, the merger could also result in a net reduction in member fees paid to PBS and NPR for national programming.