Collaborations and primary elections boosted traffic to public media sites this quarter

Each quarter, we use Similarweb data to rank web traffic for local newspapers, public media websites, nonprofit news outlets, and for-profit local news sites. Today we’re bringing you our latest public media check-in, starting with KCUR, the NPR station in Kansas City.

“I’m quite happy to say that our April traffic bump was largely a response to two pieces of longer-form, accountability journalism — totally unrelated, with totally separate collaborations, that just happened to drop close to each other,” Gabe Rosenberg, the audience editor at KCUR, told me in an email. “If I have any takeaway, it’s really just the importance of headlines that answer the question, ‘Why does this matter? Why should I care?’ Audiences found and shared both of these stories because they could emotionally connect with them.”

The first piece that contributed to the bump was a story about the Trump administration shutting down the country’s premier bee lab. It came from Harvest Public Media, a multi-state collaboration of public media stations that covers agriculture, the environment and food systems and is based out of KCUR. The story quickly blew up on Google Search and Discover, performing “astonishingly well” according to Rosenberg.

“[Harvest Public Media’s] coverage of the Trump administration’s actions on government agencies and their trickle-down effects have been particularly popular, as I’m sure they have been for many stations,” Rosenberg wrote. “I think in this particular case, the combination of the emotionality of bees as a poster image for pollinators and hurting the environment, the timing of these honeybee deaths that were news in and of themselves to most readers, and the narrative around the Trump administration led to a real home-run. Many of Harvest’s stories are national-focused, even while they are grounded in local reporting, so KCUR benefits a lot from their wide reach and appeal.”

KCUR’s traffic also got a boost through a story from another collaborative, the Midwest Newsroom. That story, about a police sniper in Missouri becoming a Missouri state trooper even though he had killed a two-year-old girl in a standoff, reached readers beyond the Kansas City metro area. The two stories together helped KCUR see nearly 170,000 more visits in April than in March.

KQED, based in San Francisco, also saw traffic bumps in April and May, thanks in large part to a tumultuous gubernatorial primary that saw Democratic frontrunner Eric Swalwell drop out of the race after being accused of sexual assault. The station’s primary elections coverage, along with a story about $700-a-month sleeping pods in San Francisco, led to major traffic bumps; KQED saw about 885,000 more visits in April than in March, and an additional 445,000 or so page visits from April to May.

“Underneath both content factors is a deliberate shift we’ve been making toward publishing the same reporting across formats, so a text story can find a second life as a vertical video months later,” wrote Peter Cavagnaro, director of communications and external affairs at KQED. “The sleeping pods piece is the clearest example: it ran in April and the vertical video version did about 900,000 views on Instagram Reels this month.”

LAist, which is home to 89.3 FM, also saw major bumps in May thanks to the California elections. According to Jon Cohn, LAist’s vice president for audience and community engagement, its Voter Game Plan and voter guides ahead of the primary led to a bump of more than 520,000 visitors in May, putting it at the top of our charts for biggest gainers by raw visits in May. (Nonprofit news publishers, too, saw traffic bumps in the quarter thanks to their coverage of primary elections.)

Here are the individual rankings for Q2 2026, broken up by month.