NPR CEO Lansing publicizes retirement

NPR chief govt John Lansing says he intends to retire on the finish of 2023. His four-year tenure will likely be outlined by his dealing with of the acute challenges of the pandemic, a racial reckoning, and headwinds within the podcasting trade that led to extreme layoffs.

“I haven’t completed every little thing I wished to perform, however I be ok with the time I had right here,” Lansing says in an interview.

Lansing says the community is at the moment again within the black, stabilized partially by further subsidies from the NPR Basis. And he says it’s poised to prosper after making robust however crucial strikes, together with the job cuts and a reorganization of the community’s govt ranks.

“I believed he did a superb job,” says Pat O’Donnell, govt director of SAG-AFTRA Washington-Mid Atlantic native, which represents greater than 500 workers. “He did the perfect he might. Disaster after disaster — oh my God.”

She cites Lansing’s fixed communication with workers through the pandemic, his conciliatory strategy to union negotiations, his emphasis on variety, and his willingness to make sure the community supplied laid-off workers extra beneficiant severance phrases than required underneath the present contract.

Throughout Lansing’s tenure, NPR’s journalists reported on the pandemic from everywhere in the globe even because the community grappled with how you can broadcast dwell throughout it; it coated crises difficult the state of the nation’s democracy, extreme financial turbulence, mass protests across the nation, and conflict in Ukraine. NPR received its first Pulitzer Prize in 2021 amongst different main journalism recognitions.

“Our work has by no means been extra vital. Our exhibits and journalists are world-class and are serving the American public with essentially the most skilled, contextual and truthful data when it has by no means been extra vital in our nation,” Lansing says.