Listeners are tuning out. Sponsorship revenue has dipped. A diversity push has generated internal turmoil. Can America’s public radio network turn things around?
Katherine Maher says the controversy stemming from an editor’s essay criticizing the radio network has been a distraction.
Uri Berliner, who has worked at NPR for 25 years, said in an essay last week that the nonprofit had allowed progressive bias to taint its coverage.
The Real Story Behind NPR’s Current Problems
Alicia Montgomery: Yes, the broadcaster is a mess. But “wokeness” isn’t the issue.
NPR has formally punished Uri Berliner, the senior editor who publicly argued a week ago that the network had “lost America’s trust” by approaching news stories with a rigidly progressive mindset. Berliner’s five-day suspension without pay, which began last Friday, has not been previously reported.
Katherine Maher, who took over the public network last month, posted years ago on Twitter that “Donald Trump is a racist.” (Armando Franca/AP)
Exclusives
“I have had a great ride over more than 50 years – and now that ride is over,” Wertheimer wrote in a memo to staffers, in which she recalled being one of the first hires on the news side at the time of the network’s debut in 1971, when “the only part of the company that was fully staffed was top management and engineering.”
She was previously chief executive of the Wikimedia Foundation, a nonprofit that supports the online encyclopedia Wikipedia.
MSNBC, NPR, Vox Media and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution are all aiming to capitalize on interest in the criminal cases against President Donald J. Trump with the shows.
NPR’s top programming executive, Anya Grundmann, announced Monday she will step down at the end of the year after nearly three decades at the network. Her record has been marked by innovations, successes and, of late, sharp setbacks buffeting the industry broadly and the network specifically. NPR has not announced a successor to Grundmann, whose departure will create the latest vacancy in a string of high-level turnovers.
Fox News is opposing a renewed effort by the Associated Press, the New York Times and NPR to unseal documents related to its recently settled defamation lawsuit, saying it would do nothing but “gratify private spite or promote public scandal.”
Elon Musk threatened to reassign NPR’s Twitter account to “another company,” according to the nonprofit news organization, in an ongoing spat between Musk and media groups since his $44 billion acquisition of Twitter last year. “So is NPR going to start posting on Twitter again, or should we reassign @NPR to another company?” Musk wrote in one email late Tuesday to NPR reporter Bobby Allyn.
NPR is quitting Twitter as a result of the Elon Musk-run social media platform continuing to label the company “state affiliated media.” The move to retire its 52 official Twitter feeds, announced Wednesday, makes it the first major news organization to leave the embattled platform since Musk’s takeover last fall.
The nonprofit media organization, which has a staff of about 1,100 people, said the layoffs were required because of a slowdown in advertising and a drop in corporate sponsorships.
He raised the profiles of the news programs Morning Edition and The World on public radio, and created the overnight program Nightwatch on CBS.
She reported on conflicts around the world and for a time was the only American broadcast journalist reporting from Baghdad during the U.S. “shock and awe” bombing campaign in 2003. (Dianna Douglas/NPR)
How NPR’s Steve Inskeep Cracked The Code For Interviewing Trump
Margaret Sullivan: The veteran host used a “truth sandwich” approach to counter the former president’s election lies. The idea is to avoid magnifying lies; and the technique is to surround false statements with established truths before and after, thus blunting the effect of what can amount to propaganda.
Donations to the public broadcaster went up sharply after the president said it was “a very good question” to ask why it still existed.
NPR Video Producer Kara Frame got involved with live digital reporting when Facebook first launched its live video capabilities in 2016. Just a couple of years later, Facebook reported that one in five videos were shot and shared live by the platform’s millions of daily users. Frame talks about lessons learned for NPR’s launch of live digital video including the tools her and the video team used to create high-quality segments and news stories with DSLR cameras.
The reporter and analyst at ABC News and NPR was 75. Roberts worked in radio and at CBS News and PBS before joining ABC News in 1988. (Credit: JohnStaleyPhoto.com)
Podcasts have been a “huge return on investment for us and a major growth engine for our business,” says NPR CFO Deborah Cowan.
