KHNS got a financial boost this fall from a statewide effort to fund Alaska’s public media stations after Congress clawed back billions in financial support for public media.
The Voices Across Alaska Fund announced a grant of just under $60,000 to the Haines-based station in mid-November. The funds are part of about $2.9 million in grants that came from a combination of more than 140 individual donors, gifts from the Rasmuson Foundation and three national foundations.
General manager Kyle Clayton said the station got its first payment in October, and a second on Monday. They’ll use them, he said, to backfill operating costs.
“All of this money is going to try to replace that,” Clayton said. “We would use it for the same thing we’d used that [Corporation for Public Broadcasting] funding for, programming, paying staff, just basic operations.”
KHNS relied on federal funding for somewhere in the neighborhood of 35-37% of its budget. It’s a problem many stations in Alaska are facing, given that they – on average – relied on federal funding for more than 32% of their operating costs, according to data compiled through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting by Semipublic founder Alex Curley.
In Haines, the new grant will cover slightly less than one-third of the hole left behind. The station got about $170,000 in federal funding last year, Clayton said.
The grant is part of an upwelling of support the station has received since Congress voted to roll back $9 billion in public media funding.
“We’ve seen an increase in support locally, across the state and nationally,” Clayton said. “It’s pretty humbling and encouraging to see so many people … try to figure out a way for us to bridge the next couple of years of uncertainty.”
Still, none of the money is designed to be ongoing.
“It’s basically buying us time to figure out how we go forward with the potential long-term loss, of at least the federal funding,” he said.