High Plains Public Radio has secured a $750,000 grant from Press Forward to develop a regional news network aimed at strengthening coverage across the rural High Plains. Over three years, HPPR will build out the High Plains Civic Media Network to serve communities in the Oklahoma and Texas panhandles, eastern Colorado, western Kansas, and far southwest Nebraska.
The grant comes at a moment of financial strain for public media. The House had voted to cut funding for public media by about $1.1 billion, a move the Senate later approved as part of a rescission package signed into law. For HPPR, the impact is felt through a reduction in core support from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), which has long provided vital operating funds and shared services. HPPR estimates the CPB cuts, combined with the loss of CPB’s core services like music rights and the satellite system, will amount to roughly $550,000 in lost funding over two years—around 15% of the station’s budget. CPB had supported HPPR for 45 years.
HPPR’s leadership frames the press forward grant as an opportunity to embrace a forward-looking model for public media. Executive director and founder Quentin Hope described the plan as a shift from a struggle to survive toward realizing the station’s potential. He noted that the Press Forward award reflects a broader industry push to innovate in order to maintain local relevance in an era of budget pressures.
The Press Forward team, which evaluates proposals in light of current funding threats to newsrooms, emphasized that a strong regional infrastructure is needed to connect smaller stations with larger entities and ensure communities still receive essential local news and information.
The civic media network is designed to be a lean, scalable operation. HPPR plans to hire three new positions for the central editorial team—a network editor, a network director, and a network digital producer—alongside its existing staff. The broader contributors network is expected to number 80 to 100 people and will comprise a mix of part-time and volunteer roles, with some participants perhaps receiving modest monthly stipends tied to output. The roster will include:
– Community correspondents covering general-interest news
– Topical correspondents focused on beats such as water resources and the Ogallala Aquifer
– Volunteer community connectors who monitor local social media and serve as HPPR ambassadors
– Regional curators who summarize and curate stories
Hope anticipates two full-time regional reporters in the network: one to cover western Kansas, another to cover the Texas Panhandle. The model intentionally differs from programs like Report for America by favoring reporters who are rooted in their communities—potentially without formal journalism training but who can be trained through partnerships with local universities and journalism faculty. Hope described the approach as “bringing the journalism to the community, rather than the journalists to the community.”
HPPR’s multi-platform strategy is central to the plan. The station currently operates two programming services: HPPR Mix, which airs on an 18-station network and via digital streaming, featuring news and public affairs (about 40% of the schedule), classical music (roughly 20%), and Americana, folk, jazz, and culture programming (roughly 30%), including 26 hours of locally produced content and about an hour daily of regional and state news. HPPR Connect brings national and international news and culture programming from NPR, Public Radio International, and others through the app and website.
In addition to broadcasts, HPPR produces 10 to 12 pieces weekly for its website. Hope notes that local news makes up only a portion of the site’s output, highlighting the challenges of delivering comprehensive local reporting across a vast rural area where engineering costs—excluding labor—consume about 46% of the budget to maintain a network of 18 transmitters, power, insurance, and maintenance. The civic network is envisioned to boost output to roughly 15 to 20 pieces per day, blending curated content, original reporting, and shorter segments to drive audience engagement and habit formation.
HPPR currently employs 10 full-time staff, including a single full-time reporter for western Kansas who operates under the Kansas News Service, with the rest handling editorial work and operations from studios in Garden City, Kansas, and Amarillo, Texas. Hope’s aim is to expand reach beyond traditional broadcasts by producing content across platforms and ensuring broader audience access to local news.
The station estimates current weekly reach at about 26,000 unique listeners and 2,500 digital streams, with roughly 28,000 unique monthly website visitors. HPPR hopes to at least triple this reach once the High Plains Civic Media Network is fully built out, a goal aligned with Press Forward’s description of the initiative as serving more than 600,000 adults across the region.
The $750,000 grant does not close HPPR’s CPB funding gap. In parallel, HPPR has launched an “Up to Us” bridge funding campaign to raise the two years of lost CPB funding over roughly four months, supplementing annual fundraising efforts that include member contributions and sponsorships. Hope stresses that the station must pursue diverse funding sources given the local economic climate and the scale of the challenge.
Hope sees the press forward award as a catalyst for a future-oriented narrative. “This is bridging and building to something that fulfills the mission, but in a far more significant way than you imagined before,” he said. “It’s the next generation of public media, or civic media for the region. That’s a more hopeful story, particularly for staff or for the board, that it’s not a struggle to survive, it’s an opportunity to fulfill the mission you had in mind from the very start.”
Summary
High Plains Public Radio’s $750,000 Press Forward grant aims to transform rural public media through the High Plains Civic Media Network, expanding local, multi-platform reporting across a wide rural region. The initiative comes amid ongoing public funding uncertainties, but HPPR frames the project as a strategic shift toward sustainable, community-rooted journalism. The plan includes a central editorial team and a broad network of community reporters, designed to boost local coverage while strengthening the station’s financial resilience and audience reach.
Additional note
If this model proves scalable, it could serve as a blueprint for other rural stations seeking to diversify funding and deepen local coverage without bearing the full cost of permanent, full-time reporters in every community. The project’s success will hinge on effective training partnerships, sustainable funding, and the ability to translate local reporting into measurable audience growth across broadcast and digital platforms.