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.
Susan Goldberg, president and CEO of GBH, said the merger will not result in any immediate staff reductions and may lead to new position in the future. Celeste Sloman
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.
NEPM currently has 44 employees, while GBH has 705. Goldberg said the merger will not result in any immediate staff reductions, and that she hopes it leads to the creation of new positions over time.
When the merger is completed, NEPM will retain its brand, programming, and Springfield and UMass studios. Matt Abramovitz, the president of NEPM, called that continuity crucial.
“It’s been so important to maintain the NEPM brand, because one of the things that sets public media apart from just about every other media organization in this country is that we live here, right?” Abramovitz told GBH News. “So while other media companies are talking about users, we talk about our neighbors.”
“We’re in this community, and we are looking at ways that we can be on the ground,” he added. “And it’s important for us not to have that just disappear as we consolidate back-end functions. The trust we have built over the years is with NEPM, and we want to maintain that.”
Like Goldberg, Abramovitz suggested that GBH and NEPM can have a greater impact working collaboratively as part of one larger organization than they did as two affiliated, but distinct, entities.
“Because we are going to be intentionally working together, with meetings at all levels across all departments across the state, we will find ways of having greater impact across Massachusetts,” Abramovitz said. “And I think in a time when everyone feels disconnected from their neighborhood — we’re in kind of a really lonely moment — the opportunity for public media is to use our local power and make us feel more connected across the commonwealth.”
When the merger is complete, Abramovitz will remain president of NEPM and will also become vice president of audience strategy and operations at GBH. Dan Lothian, the editor-in-chief of GBH News and the national radio program The World, will supervise digital, radio, and television reporting statewide at GBH, NEPM, and CAI.
A GBH spokesperson said the boards of both NEPM and GBH have approved the merger. The transfer of NEPM broadcast licenses to GBH is pending approval by the Federal Communications Commission.
This story was reported by Adam Reilly and edited by Senior Editor Jeff Keating and Senior Digital Editor Don Seiffert. No WGBH Educational Foundation official or GBH News executive reviewed this story before it was published.