Seattle’s Cascade PBS blamed federal cuts for layoffs, announced last week, that will end its foray into written local news coverage.

But its hybrid newsroom, formed by the 2015 acquisition of online news startup Crosscut, was already moving toward more short-form video before President Donald Trump and Congress swung their ax at public broadcasters.

Despite some great work the merger never seemed to fully gel. Local news remained sparse on Cascade’s primary channel, KCTS 9, and its online news site never drew huge readership.

Now the layoffs are driving the last nail into Crosscut’s coffin. They add to questions about how much public broadcasters can replace the loss of in-depth, local reporting that newspapers historically provided.

Public broadcasters are a critical part of the news ecosystem. They provide important news and information and must be supported. But the amount of original, local reporting they do varies widely and now they’ve lost $1.1 billion in federal funding through 2027.

I’m trying to be hopeful that the federal government will return to supporting a free and independent press at some point.

When that happens, and Congress considers restoring public broadcasters’ funding, I suggest they use that opportunity to address the overall decline of local news.

A resurrected Corporation for Public Broadcasting might revise its community service grant program, to encourage or direct recipients to produce more local news and public affairs coverage.

By then America’s need for local journalism will be even greater. Newspapers, which provide most civic coverage, are closing at a rate of more than two per week and more than half of U.S. counties have little to no remaining coverage.

Television news is facing an imminent wave of consolidation. CBS, CNN and scores of local stations are in play. Media moguls are kowtowing and Kimmeling to grease the skids.

On Tuesday the Federal Communications Commission will consider relaxing limits on ownership of local stations and major TV networks. It could allow investors to own more stations in a local market, or combine two networks under a single owner.

Consolidation will further reduce original reporting. Buyers will cut costs to pay debt, and it’s cheaper to use material shared across networks.

That could create an opportunity for public broadcasters if they were inclined and weren’t hobbled by federal cuts.

Cascade tried. Now it’s more likely to pursue partnerships with local media outlets than substantially increase its own reporting, Rob Dunlop, its president and CEO, told me last week.

“I do think that the local news organizations are going to need to find ways in which we work more closely together in order to provide greater, broader coverage of local stories,” he said.

Dunlop said Cascade’s financial hit is more than just $3.5 million in federal dollars lost in fiscal 2026.

“We would manage our way through that but this is 2026 and forever, when you consider now that we’ve got to think about a hole that’s $7 million over two years and $17.5 million over five years and $35 million over 10 years,” he said. “When you start to think about the horizon of this kind of loss, it really does challenge the organization to think about what it needs to do in order to right-size itself for the long haul.”

Collaboration is happening across local news as outlets try to do more with less.

This can be fruitful. But it’s a step back from the approach a decade ago, when Cascade was among a handful of public stations growing local coverage by acquiring local outlets, mostly digital startups. Some saw this as a potential solution to the spread of news deserts.

These mergers began in 2013, according to a report by Harvard’s Shorenstein Center, and peaked when Chicago NPR affiliate WBEZ acquired the Chicago Sun-Times newspaper in 2022.

While this brought new strengths to the organizations and resulted in some great journalism, it’s now clear that public broadcasters aren’t immune from the revenue and audience losses pummeling the news industry.

Cascade may be an outlier by quitting long-form journalism but its peers are all in flux as they lose funding.

“It’s certainly a wrenching thing to have to do and truly forced by the Trump cuts,” Essex Porter, a former KIRO journalist on Cascade’s board, told me.

The outcome is especially painful for David Brewster, the former Seattle Weekly publisher who founded Crosscut.

“To their credit, they really did believe in the adventure when it was still Crosscut and they invested in that,” he said. “But … they lost faith in that and they whittled it down and it became largely feature news and personality driven.”

Seattle would have lost Crosscut either way. Before the merger it struggled as a commercial venture, switched to a nonprofit and “never really had the ability to fund real news gathering and to pay much for those reporters,” Brewster said.

KCTS rebranded as Cascade PBS and initially poured resources into the local-news project. But a series of cuts and reorganizations concluded in this week’s decision to lay off 19 newsroom staffers and hire three multimedia specialists.

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Instead of writing stories for Cascade’s website, its newsroom will mostly produce 90-second and five-minute news segments, Dunlop said. They will air in gaps between national shows on KCTS 9, likely more frequently, and post on YouTube and social media. Cascade will also continue its local history, food and arts shows.

Cascade would have kept the larger newsroom “if we were able to support it financially,” Porter said. But the station still would have “continued to find ways to also present some of the journalism in shorter forms.”

Brewster was more blunt.

“It was always an awkward marriage of Crosscut and a television station,” he said. “And as I suspected, eventually the television side kind of won out.”

This is excerpted from the free, weekly Voices for a Free Press newsletter. Sign up to receive it at the Save the Free Press website, st.news/SavetheFreePress. Seattle Times’ Brier Dudley is the editor of the Free Press Initiative, which aims to inform the public about issues facing newspapers, local news coverage, and a free press. You can learn more about the Free Press Initiative, or sign up for a newsletter, at https://company.seattletimes.com/save-the-free-press/.