Unbundling the Pledge Drive: A Vertical Strategy for Public Media
The "Viewer Like You" model is broken. Here is how to fix it without federal funding.
The New York Times has been building a playbook since 2017 that every public media leader needs to study.
They released Cooking. They released Wirecutter. They released Games. Then they watched those products drive users who had no previous interest in news into the fold.
By 2021, Cooking and Games alone boasted over a million subscribers. That did not even count The Athletic, Audio, or even the flagship publication. According to Nieman Lab, nearly a third of Times subscribers now pay only for a non-news product. These verticals are on-ramps. They give users a reason to enter the broader ecosystem.
This strategy is paying off. The Times reported $494.6 million in subscription revenue in Q3 2025. Digital-only products drove most of that growth. They are on pace for another double-digit increase in Q4.
The Mindset Shift
You know what the pushback sounds like. The Times has resources. They have engineers. They have hundreds of staff members. Public television stations don’t. It feels like comparing a rowboat to a cruise ship.
You don’t need their money to borrow their strategy.
You only need their mindset.
The Times didn’t crack this nut by building expensive technology. They cracked it by packaging value to reach people who were never going to come to traditional news as a starting point. That is where the opportunity lies for public media and specifically for public television.
We have heard a lot recently about the role of federal funding. The truth is that for most stations the vast majority of money comes from individual members, foundations, and underwriting. Those are the revenue lines that really count. Yet nearly every station has only one basic membership and two payment options. You can either pay monthly or annually. A few stations, like KQED, have Leadership Circle or Signal Society tiers. But even those are general memberships.
Consider what that means.
If someone has zero interest in “50 Years with Peter Paul and Mary” or “America’s Home Cooking” or yet another Andrea Bocelli special, they are not going to join. I know stations are more than a rotation of pledge specials even when that is the programming that takes the spotlight. I know this because I spent almost a decade in public media.
Stations have food shows. Stations have history programs. Stations have documentaries. Stations have arts content. Stations have kids programming. So let’s start where the Times started.
The Cooking Strategy
I want to look at Cooking as an example.
Think about a station offering a specific “Food and Cooking” membership. Price it at $60 per year. It comes with PBS Passport. That part is easy. The value is in the local layer. A station could create a dedicated food video page. They could curate clips from national shows and mix those in with local stories. A newsletter with recipes from their programs would also be a no-brainer.
Community value is a plus.
When I was at Lehigh Valley Public Media, we had a production-ready kitchen that served as the basis for all kinds of events — including a locally produced program called “Cooking for Baby & Me.” Lots of stations have production kitchens that could do the same. Member-only demos or tastings would be a great use of that space. Stations could also bring in local food creators or influencers to cook in those kitchens. My colleagues at the American Press Institute have been working with stations on smart approaches to bring creators into public media. This is the ideal use case. You open doors for new creators. You find new audiences. You build trust in real-life experiences instead of hoping someone comes to your station for another pledge drive.
If this is so easy to do, why aren’t stations doing it already?
Membership programs are complicated. Also, any new idea has to overcome the perception that it is an expense long before it can be considered a revenue source.
So let’s talk about the math.
A full-time salary for a cooking producer plus benefits might run about $65k.
A $60 membership requires only 1,100 people to break even.
1,100 members is not a moonshot. 1,100 members is a plan.
This model won’t work for every station. It will be a fit for some but not all. The bigger point is that public media needs to get over the idea that every viewer needs the same basic membership. The Times realized that general membership does not scale. I know saying “the model is broken” has become a cliché. But the industry must wake up to the fact that public media is facing the same reality the Times faced.
We need to start thinking about how we package value.
We need to start building memberships around interests instead of a one-size-fits-all approach.
We need to start unbundling the pledge drive.
I know this sounds simple on paper and hard in practice. If you are running a membership program, tell me what I’m missing. Is the barrier technology, culture, or bandwidth?
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