NPR chief authorities John Lansing says he intends to retire on the tip of 2023. His four-year tenure could possibly be outlined by his dealing with of the acute challenges of the pandemic, a racial reckoning, and headwinds all through the podcasting enterprise that led to extreme layoffs.
“I haven’t completed the entire thing I needed to hold out, nonetheless I be happy with the time I had correct proper right here,” Lansing says in an interview.
Lansing says the group is presently as soon as extra all through the black, stabilized partly by further subsidies from the NPR Basis. And he says it’s poised to prosper after making extremely efficient nonetheless essential strikes, together with the job cuts and a reorganization of the group’s authorities ranks.
“I believed he did a wonderful job,” says Pat O’Donnell, authorities director of SAG-AFTRA Washington-Mid Atlantic native, which represents bigger than 500 employees. “He did the only he might. Disaster after disaster — oh my God.”
She cites Lansing’s mounted communication with staff all by way of the pandemic, his conciliatory method to union negotiations, his emphasis on choice, and his willingness to make sure the group equipped laid-off employees further beneficiant severance phrases than required beneath the prevailing contract.
All by way of Lansing’s tenure, NPR’s journalists reported on the pandemic from all through the globe even because of the group grappled with the best option to broadcast dwell all by way of it; it lined crises powerful the state of the nation’s democracy, extreme financial turbulence, mass protests all through the nation, and warfare in Ukraine. NPR gained its first Pulitzer Prize in 2021 amongst completely completely different important journalism recognitions.
“Our work has not at all been further essential. Our reveals and journalists are world-class and are serving the American public with mainly basically essentially the most knowledgeable, contextual and truthful information when it has not at all been further essential in our nation,” Lansing says.