The past week brought more bad news for public broadcasting and should act as a wake-up call — as if another is actually needed — for those leading public-trust journalism operations in this country.

The news that Pittsburgh-based WQED Multimedia is cutting 17 jobs as well as executive salaries as part of a 15-year plan to free itself of about $5 million in debt is a major blow to one of this region’s finest public institutions.

The announcement exposes sloppy financial management at an award-winning company which oversees the historic television station that was the first to air “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood,” and was also the first community-supported television station in the nation. When it came into existence in 1954, WQED was just the fifth public television station in America.

With the ascension of the 24-hour cable news cycle — which glorifies opining and values a titillating name over a trustworthy source of information — public news broadcasting seems to many like a dusty relic. Viewership data leave no doubt about that.

National Public Radio saw its average weekly broadcast audience fall by more than 1 million listeners in 2014, a decline of about 4 percent, according to the Pew Research Center.

The Public Broadcasting Service’s NewsHour, PBS’s flagship news program, is also lagging far behind. The program’s website drew nearly 4 million visitors in January of this year.

In that same month NBC News drew 56 million visitors; CBS drew 47 million; and Yahoo/ABC News drew 65 million, according to the center.

That poor performance by public broadcasting also comes at a time when many people are checking out of the cable news system. Prime-time viewership for CNN, Fox News and MSNBC was down 8 percent in 2014, according to Nielsen Media Research.

The exodus has benefitted local news stations, which in 2014 saw audiences for their evening broadcasts rise 5 percent, according to Nielson, after losing more than 6 percent of their viewership two years ago. The stations took in nearly $20 billion in revenue in 2014, an increase attributed mostly to political advertising.

That’s a good trend — we like keeping it local — but not without its own complications. Over the past decade Pew has found that local stations are focusing more on traffic, weather and sports stories.

The average length of news stories has shrunk and the amount of time stations devote to in-depth journalism is declining. From 2005 to 2012 the stations’ coverage of politics and government was down more than 50 percent. That’s a troubling trend because those are important functions of any news operation.

Equally troubling is public broadcasting’s inability to capitalize on the souring relationship between viewers and cable news operations. At a time when some viewers are — thankfully, finally — fleeing those broadcasts, public-trust journalism continues to flounder.

WQED’s financial problems are not unique. NPR is also struggling with a multimillion-dollar debt load it hopes to erase by the end of 2015. WQED, which has been on a downward trajectory for decades, made the cuts it did to survive.

Just getting out of the red or surviving isn’t good enough anymore. These public institutions need to find a way to reconnect with the public consciousness and contribute to our national discourse in a meaningful way. Otherwise taxpayers and donors are just throwing good money after bad.