New England Public Media is coming under criticism from members of the region’s Hispanic community after management laid off 20% of the nonprofit organization’s staff, including several prominent Latina and Latino journalists.
Last week, 10 members of NEPM’s former Latino Advisory Board — which previously had been folded into a broader Community Advisory Board — resigned in protest over the unexpected decision by the organization’s leadership to put 17 staffers out of work last month.
Management has said the layoffs were due to the “serious financial headwinds” that NEPM is facing.
In a letter to station President Matt Abramovitz, first reported in The Republican, the advisory board members wrote that the layoffs “repeated historical patterns of marginalization and devaluation of our community, which represents Black people, Latinas and Latinos, Indigenous peoples, LGBTQ+ people and others who both history and people in our own contemporary times keep excluded from decisions concerning programming, resources, and communications.”
The letter was signed by Natalia Muñoz, Heshima Moja, Alan Bloomgarden, Waleska Lugo-DeJesús, Mari Castañeda, Agma María Sweeney, Claudia Quintero, Javier Luengo-Garrido, Lucila J. Satana and Gaddier Rosario. The group — which includes local artists, academics, media professionals and community leaders — wrote that NEPM treated them “with lip service to inclusion and belonging and actions that belie those values. …
“While we recognize it can sometimes be necessary to impose budgetary and staffing cuts, what we question here is the way that layoff was handled, and the disproportionate percentage of people of color affected by this decision within an organization already struggling to achieve staff representation appropriate to its community,” the letter said.
The letter calls for NEPM to reinstate the long-running magazine-style TV series “Connecting Point,” which had covered civic affairs and local culture since 2010. That show’s entire staff was laid off, including host Zydalis Bauer, a Holyoke native and an alumna of WGBY’s Latino Youth Media Institute, which gave young people journalism training. The group called for the rehiring of Bauer or another woman of color to host and form a team to produce the program, as well as a commitment from NEPM to appoint “enough board members who represent people of color, including LGBTQIA+, that there would be a majority there to closely supervise [Abramovitz] or his successor.”
In an email, an NEPM spokesperson said that Abramovitz was unavailable for an interview this week.
Instead, the station provided a statement in which Abramovitz said that NEPM is grateful for the service of the Community Advisory Board members and that the station is committed "both to our community and to transforming NEPM into a more nimble multi-platform media company that centers our audience’s needs. …
“The recent decision to make staff cuts at NEPM was not easy, but we needed to address the structural business issues facing the company,” Abramovitz said. “This is a difficult time for all affected and it will take time to rebuild. As we adapt to a radically reshaped media environment, NEPM remains committed to representing diverse voices and perspectives in its journalism and storytelling.”
NEPM was created in 2019 when New England Public Radio merged with Springfield’s WGBY public television, a subsidiary of the Boston public media outlet GBH. The organization hired Abramovitz in February 2022 to succeed longtime NEPR president Martin Miller, who led the stations through the merger.
At the time of the merger, some NEPR staffers — who were also University of Massachusetts Amherst employees — were unionized, represented by the Massachusetts Teachers Union, while WGBY workers were not unionized. After the merger, staffers who had come from NEPR continued to be union members, but new hires were no longer represented by a union. Only one of the laid-off employees was a union member.
Financial records on NEPM’s website show that last fiscal year, the station reported a $4.67 million loss. The organization had $7.9 million in total operating revenue, including nearly $3.9 million directly from viewers and listeners, but had $12.6 million in operating expenses, including $6.2 million in wages and $586,055 in retirement and benefit contributions. The previous year, the organization posted an operating loss of $3.8 million.
NEPM is in the midst of a nearly $9 million project to upgrade its Hampden Street studios, which will be the organization’s new headquarters. In their letter to NEPM, the members of the former Latino Advisory Board said that many of them were recently given a tour of the building, shortly before the layoffs. They now question the timing of that visit.
“That many of us were brought to a showcase of your upgraded facilities at a moment you would most certainly have been involved in unmentioned planning to gut programming around which our efforts have been centered strikes us as truly cynical and dishonest,” the letter said.
In the mid-2000s, the letter continued, WGBY had invested resources into several initiatives that promised greater inclusion and equity. They included the creation of the dual-language TV program “Presencia,” which Bauer co-hosted with Veronica Garcia, as well as projects like the Latino Youth Media Initiative and Telling Our Legacies Digitally, a storytelling workshop for community members to share their personal stories. Those “modest but important steps,” however, now feel discarded, the group said.
In the April edition of the Amherst-based publication El Sol Latino, journalist Manuel Frau-Ramos highlighted other Hispanic-run programs that the organizations have canceled over the years, from the 1980 ending of the community affairs show “¿Qué Tal, Amigos?” to the station's 2007 decision to end its only local Latino show at the time, the music program “Tertulia.” (After complaints from listeners, the station restored the program but with fewer hours.) He noted that the most recent round of layoffs included journalist Iohann Rashi Vega, the director of NEPM’s Media Lab.
"These are just a few examples of how public communication media has repeatedly failed the Latino community," he wrote. “These most recent cuts constitute a serious setback to the relationship between NEPM and the community that they are supposed to serve.”
In a phone interview, Muñoz — who works as the news director at Holyoke Media — said that she had served on the former Latino Advisory Board for many years. She said she now feels like that group had been an item on NEPM’s “checklist.”
Muñoz said she understands that layoffs may have been necessary but believes that the manner in which they were done — with no forewarning to impacted employees or the community — was wrong. She also said that budgetary decisions reflect the philosophy of an organization.
“They decided to keep going after the white, rich Anglo audiences rather than being a truly community radio station that brings in all the voices,” she said.
As for her decision to resign with her fellow Community Advisory Board members, Muñoz said she’s not interested in helping the station maintain the appearance of public engagement.
“I’m too busy for the theater of pretending to have a real voice at a broadcasting company that just uses us when they go out looking for funding,” she said.
This story was independently reported by Dusty Christensen and edited by Maureen Turner at the request of the NEPM newsroom. NEPM leadership did not review the story before publication.
