NPR CEO Katherine Maher Discusses Recent Restructuring and Adapting to Federal Defunding

In the fourth episode of the State of Local News Podcast, host Tim Franklin—Professor, John M. Mutz Chair in Local News, and founding director of the Medill Local News Initiative—speaks with Katherine Maher, President and CEO of NPR.

Maher joins Tim Franklin on the State of Local News Podcast to discuss the rapidly shifting landscape of public media amid federal funding cuts, audience fragmentation, and technological disruption. Maher outlines NPR’s restructuring efforts, the importance of strengthening the local-public media network, and the organization’s investments in digital transformation, video storytelling, and regional newsroom collaborations. The conversation also explores how public radio can evolve from a traditional broadcast model into a digitally integrated, community-centered network—while continuing to serve as one of the most trusted sources of local and national news in the United States.

This Q&A transcript captures their conversation on the future of public media, local journalism, AI and how NPR is adapting to technological and financial transformation. It has been edited for brevity and clarity.

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  Hello everyone and welcome to the State of Local News podcast at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. It's great to have you with us. I'm your host, Tim Franklin, the John M. Mutz Chair in Local News at Medill, home of the Medill Local News Initiative. It's especially great and timely to have with us for this episode Katherine Maher, the president and CEO of National Public Radio. Katherine, welcome to the podcast.

  Tim Franklin

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  Thank you. It's great to be here, Tim.

  Katherine Maher

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  It's great to have you. So, there are tectonic shifts happening, as you know, at NPR, obviously, at public broadcasting, at the media industry generally. And I want to dive into those transformational changes over the next 30 minutes. But as with all our episodes, I want to introduce our audience to you briefly. Katherine, it's safe to say that while your background is incredibly impressive, it's not one of a traditional media executive. After graduating from NYU, you worked as an innovation and communications officer at UNICEF and then made a few other stops, including at the World Bank. In 2014, you moved to the Wikimedia Foundation, which is the nonprofit that supports and operates Wikipedia, where you rose to become a CEO. Later, you served as CEO of Web Summit, and kind of the through line through all of your work has been free speech and public right to information through technology.

  A little more than two years ago, you were named the CEO of NPR, and so much for the honeymoon in the new job. Things have been really calm, kind of steady during your time there.

  Tim Franklin

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  Very public media.

  Katherine Maher

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  So you had been at your desk for two weeks at NPR when you found yourself embroiled in a controversy about alleged bias at NPR made by a former business editor, Uri Berliner. And then a year or so later, the Republican-controlled Congress stripped $1.1 billion from NPR, PBS and member stations across the country. So welcome to the media industry. And your chair has not just been on fire since you arrived. It's been fully engulfed in flames. So let's start with a big picture question. How do you go about leading a large, complex media organization like NPR at both this time of hyperpartisanship in the country, coupled with these massive historical technological changes that are disrupting the media industry business model as well as how people consume news. I know it's a big question, but if you could tackle that one for us, I know folks would be interested.

  Tim Franklin

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  One day at a time. It is a little bit like dancing through raindrops and trying to stay dry. I think that the way that I go about it is trying to keep the big vision in mind and trying to navigate from a set of values and principles. So the big vision is that public media matters for America and it matters not just for the news that we produce and the cultural programming we produce, but because I view it as the heart of, the scaffolding for healthy civic conversations and stronger communities. And that, to me, is what we need right now. You mentioned an era of hyperpartisanship. We know that where local news exists, you see decreased levels of partisanship, higher confidence in democratic institutions, more trust in your community. So that's the big picture. And then the values are that we're independent, that we have the integrity of our reporting at the forefront of everything that we do, that we serve the public interest and nobody else. And then you try to make decisions based on that and keep an eye on what's coming down the line. I think that the big transformation for us is that we're going to have to be just as agile as any other entity trying to adapt to this changing technological environment, changing audience needs, and hopefully that independence and that integrity and that agility and the fact that public media really started as an innovator and disruptor is a legacy and a history that we can draw on in order to be strong into the future.

  Katherine Maher

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  Yeah. And I want to get into some of those changes that may be coming a little bit later, but I wanted to start with the news of this week. So as we're recording this, NPR announced just a few days ago a restructuring of its newsroom to help plug an $8 million budget gap. You told the staff that NPR expects to earn $15 million less in station fees this year and is anticipating a drop in corporate sponsorship revenue. To help offset those losses, you're offering buyouts to about 300 newsroom staffers and will accept up to 30. Layoffs might ensue if not enough folks take the buyouts. So given all that's happening, please tell us and tell our audience about the current state of NPR as you see it and what your goals are with this restructuring.

  Tim Franklin

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  Yeah. It has been a hard week here, and of course it's not a series of actions that anybody wants to take. I will say that we are relieved that it has not been more drastic. I know that's cold comfort relative to the implications for our colleagues, and of course nobody wants to be in a position of cutting news. We thought that this was going to potentially be much worse, thank goodness, and really truly deep appreciation for all of the individual listeners and donors who've stepped up in this moment. The goal here is to get us to a place of sustainability. I mean, there's two things that can be true at the same time. One is that it feels like the right restructuring of the newsroom around the core beats and work that NPR is great at: the sort of enterprise, deep journalism that feels different from what else is out there and really sort of gathering our strengths around those, whether that's education, whether that's our national network.

  It is also an opportunity for us to say, how do we plug what is this gap that we anticipate and we foresaw some of the federal funding loss, so that we can move to the future from a place of greater sustainability. And ultimately what we would hope to get to is strength, and that speaks a little bit to the network strategy that I'd love to talk a little bit about, which is really about connecting to that local news that is such a priority here.

  Katherine Maher

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  Yeah, sure. Let's get to that. Before that, you mentioned that things could have been worse and you're fortunate in how donors have stepped up and other contributors. So looking nationally, there were predictions, including by me, that we could see 75 to 100 local public radio stations shutter because of these congressional funding cuts. The average public radio station lost about 10% of its annual budget from the defunding. In smaller markets, that percentage loss is often much higher and even up to 90% in some extreme cases. So you have 246 or thereabouts member stations. Then when you include so-called repeater stations, or stations that pick up signals from others, as well as other affiliated stations, I think there's a total of about 1,100 across the country.

  Tim Franklin

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  That’s right.

  Katherine Maher

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  Do you know how many of those have closed? And it seems like this could have been much more catastrophic and [was] not as catastrophic as I thought it might be.

  Tim Franklin

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  Well, I would also caution us not to take a victory lap yet. I mean, the funds that came in at the end of the year were through 2026, and then we know that there was this tremendous public outpouring of support in order to be able to sustain stations and philanthropic commitments through the Public Media Bridge Fund. All of that has been material, meaningful, but what we really need is to rethink the way that the public media network works. Otherwise we're just pushing the cliff forward. And so part of the conversation we're having in the network is what does the future of sustainability look like? And of course we can talk too about the opportunities to restore federal funding in different ways; we've got some thoughts on that. But it is the case that there are a number of stations that are in conversation around consolidation, shared services, roll-ups, transfers of signals, signal licenses. And so I would be cautious about saying that we're out of the woods. I am thrilled that that cliff did not show up within six months because it gives us more time to be able to move the network into a place of greater sustainability.

  Katherine Maher

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  And just to follow up, are you aware of station closures or do you know how many there have been?

  Tim Franklin

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  There have been a few stations that are in the process of consolidating and transferring. There has been a tremendous effort to not close stations. All stations are independent. There may be things that I'm unaware of simply because they have their own independent governance and operating, but at this point in time, mostly what we're looking at is how do we as a network support one another to remain a robust network?

  Katherine Maher

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  Sure. And are you getting the sense that while there haven't been as many station closures as predicted that coverage has contracted at some of those stations?

  Tim Franklin

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  I would differentiate — and this is a big, important thing I think we need to get comfortable talking about at public media — between universal service in the sense of being covered by a broadcast signal, we cover about 97% of the population today, versus universal coverage in the sense of local journalism. And right now, yes, universal coverage in the sense of local journalism has absolutely contracted. The loss of the funding from the federal dollars but also state dollars means that you've seen various different organizations have to lay off staff. I think in Indiana, the state legislature took away funding for public radio there and really regretfully, they let go of a number of their state reporters who were focused on the legislature itself.

  Katherine Maher

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  Right, right. Okay, so not a victory lap and totally get the caution there, but a bit of incredibly good news as you announced recently on April 16th: a total of $113 million from two charitable gifts, the second and third largest in NPR's history. Philanthropist Connie Ballmer, the wife of LA Clippers owner and former Microsoft CEO, Steve Ballmer, gifted $80 million to NPR. How will this set up NPR going forward? And perhaps you could explain why NPR is doing buyouts at the same time you're receiving these large gifts. I know these are in different buckets of funds, but perhaps you could address that as well.

  Tim Franklin

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  I appreciate the chance. It's a question that multiple people have asked and reasonably so. So we received the gifts with a purpose designation, which is to invest in the network and to invest in the technology needed for public radio to transform and be sustainable for the long run. And so what does that mean? It means that radio, while a huge and important piece of our work, is not necessarily the technology younger people are turning to, and increasingly the path to sustainability is a relationship directly with our audience that is augmented by a digital relationship. I know that you just recently had Ben Cotton from the New York Times on talking about subscriptions. It's a very similar sort of conversation. Public radio has long had a membership structure where you support your local station. We believe that that is migrating into a digital backbone, and what NPR has done is we've solicited this gift in order to strengthen that digital backbone, not just for us, but for our network as a whole.

  We already do shared donations where people who donate to us, 50% goes to NPR, 50% goes to the network. We think there's a huge opportunity to expand that out and make sure that every station has the top of the line infrastructure they need to be supporting their donors, to be engaging their audiences and converting this to sustainability over the long run. So those gifts were purposely designated to support that transformation along with other investments in video, for example, like we're doing here today. Unfortunately, those gifts are not for regular operating funds in a way that would allow for us to plug a gap. They're really about a sustainability play. And so I think of this as the bridge to the future. In three years time, four years time, we believe those gifts will start to return the sort of sustainability from a financial perspective. Unfortunately, we still have to get through those three to four years.

  Katherine Maher

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  I think in addition to the buyout questions, some people would say, and you just talked about the help this could provide to some local stations. This influx of money that's coming in or has come into NPR through gifts—how will it eventually help local stations in addition to the technological things that you just mentioned?

  Tim Franklin

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  Well, one thing that happened was we had received a gift from an anonymous donor of about $33 million. We were able to use that to make the decision to provide fee relief for our network in the aftermath of federal defunding. And that was an $8 million fund that we immediately put forward to drop our member network fees, and that included, for some of our smaller rural stations, waiving those fees entirely. As we go into the future, what we're looking at is a $15 million reduction in member fees, which is a pretty significant chunk of our overall revenue. That is also something that we're able to commit to because we know that these gifts exist. And so we're seeing those resources go into the network, not necessarily as a direct transfer of funds, but in terms of subsidizing the cost of operating the infrastructure for the network as a whole.

  We also have been able, through a different avenue of influx of monies, to waive all of what was called interconnection fees, which is the way that we distribute our programming for the next two years for our member stations. And so really what we're trying to do is lighten the load while we get through this period. I think all in all, we've returned about $30 million to the network just in the last year alone through donations and in kind support thanks to these larger gifts.

  Katherine Maher

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  Yeah, that's significant. And are you now assuming that federal funding probably is never coming back, or do you have to assume that federal funding is not coming back?

  Tim Franklin

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  I would say that federal funding's probably never going to come back in the way that it was set up previously. The Public Broadcasting Act is still on the books. People laugh at me around these parts. It's an extraordinary text. I always love going back and reading it — so aspirational. I wish that we saw Congress pass this kind of legislation today, not just in intent but in aspiration of what this nation can be. I don't think we're going to see the Corporation for Public Broadcasting come back, and I actually think that I wouldn't necessarily advise that that's the direction that we advocate for, in part because I worry about it being a litmus test for every future Congress to tussle over whether it should or shouldn't be funded. What I am really excited about is the Rural Radio Resiliency Fund that we're working with Congress on developing a proposal for, which would be $100 million in funding for public infrastructure for rural communities to ensure that that essential public service, that essential public safety infrastructure, remains online and available to all of the folks who depend on it.

  And so I think there's an avenue to really focus on the infrastructure piece because people recognize across the nation, regardless of your political affiliation, how important that is to the communities that they're in.

  Katherine Maher

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  Sure. I'd love to talk more about that. Public radio, I've long thought, could be a solution to this local news crisis that we're in, the growing number of news deserts, the loss of local journalism. There are now more than 200 news desert counties across the country. What role you've talked a little bit about this new fund that's being proposed, but do you see a pathway still despite the federal funding cuts for public radio to help plug this local news crisis that's occurring in the US today?

  Katherine MaherL

  Absolutely. We have more than 200 newsrooms in our network. Now, some of those newsrooms are really small. You're talking about one person who hosts Morning Edition and then leaves their desk and goes out and reports all day long. They also probably turn off the lights at the end of the day in their station, but they are a vital piece of the infrastructure of what supports their community, they’re a trusted voice. I've been on the road out at lunch with one of these individuals and the waitress who was serving us was like, "I know who you are. You're so- and-so from my local station." And that's the kind of relationship folks have just by voice and trust alone. My view is that the public radio is an antidote in part. It's not the only piece of the puzzle. I believe that this is actually a huge opportunity for us to work more closely with other nonprofit news organizations, perhaps for- profit news organizations, that serve local communities.

  The whole conversation about what public radio or public media is in a post-federal funding environment, I think can really be converted to public interest as opposed to public funding and that's an enormous space for us to explore. But, the way that I see this playing out is if we are able to address some of the infrastructure questions on our level at NPR, that means that stations can spend more of their time focusing on the local reporting, cultural programming, community affairs work that is actually so essential to what roots them in their communities. It's a mentality shift of my primary responsibility is operating a series of towers, still really important, to my primary responsibility is serving my community. And that actually goes back to the text of the local Public Broadcasting Act to address issues of national interests and local concerns. So, I think there's a huge space for us to play here.

  We're already doing this work. We already, as I said, 97% of the country has access to a broadcast signal from public radio. In my mind, this is an opportunity for us to deepen this and to really serve a need that exists in the country today and think about how we reinterpret our mission for the future, not just a more informed America, but a more connected America at the community level.

  Right, absolutely. And in addition to that investment, you've also been investing in recent years in these networks across the country. There's one here in the Midwest––.

  Tim Franklin

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  Yes, the regional news initiatives.

  Katherine Maher

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  Yeah, right. Can you talk about that a little bit and also the role that that could play in helping to fill some of these gaps?

  Tim Franklin

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  This is so great and this predates me. I wish I could claim credit for it, but I'm fully committed to expanding it. So this actually is something that started in Texas. It's the Texas Regional Newsroom. I love that Texas is both a state and a region and a country, depending on who you talk to. And it brought together our 13 stations in Texas to share capacity around reporting on things that matter to Texans, not just if you're in San Antonio, not just if you're in Amarillo, but what matters across the whole state and that allows for those stations to do local reporting and regional reporting. And that model has now been replicated. There's one in California, there's seven across the country, there's the Midwest, there's the Rocky Mountain States, there's Mid-South Appalachia. I can go on. I think that that is a huge way of us contributing back not just to the strength of local stations, but to creating an ecosystem that develops talent, that ensures that stations that are in news desert areas are able to tap into what's happening regionally, to do cross-cutting themes.

  So for example, water rights in the southwest or in the Rocky Mountain areas. The wildfires are a big issue that are also cross regional. My vision is that as NPR, we are investing more deeply in this and that's another way for us to really think about how we get to true national universal coverage again as distinct from that universal broadcast service.

  Katherine Maher

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  Yeah. I'm a big believer in the network model and if you look at our state of local news report, and I'm sure that you have, the growth that we’ve seen––

  Tim Franklin

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  Yes, many times.

  Katherine Maher

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  Thank you!

  Tim Franklin

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  Thanks for that. Thank you for doing it. No, it's great work.

  Katherine Maher

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  But in an otherwise kind of shrinking local news ecosystem nationally, the one growth area we've seen not just with NPR, but with other areas are these network models where as you say, local journalists can focus on the journalism and then you've got the support of the overarching entity to help with back office functions and to help with audience growth and that sort of thing.

  Tim Franklin

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  And our colleagues in Alaska have been really early to this. There's an organization called Coast Alaska that's been doing this for some time. You have these tiny Alaskan stations that are essential to their communities, and I really do mean that: public safety, the ability for communities to connect in areas where there is zero broadband or cell phone coverage. Coast Alaska provides that backend infrastructure and is allowed for these stations to be much more sustainable. And so I see that as a model that can absolutely be replicated.

  Katherine Maher

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  Yeah, absolutely. Well, so let's talk about some other big picture models in the time we have left. Could you talk about the future of NPR storytelling? How does a news organization founded in audio with the deep well of coverage and pixels adapt to the video era? You're obviously in a video studio at the moment, but where do you see that headed?

  Tim Franklin

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  Well, you just got a thumbs up from some of my folks in the control room across the way. They love that! Thank you for the shout out. So I actually, when I came into the organization, one of the things that seemed really evident to me is that we are storytellers. I mean, we tell nonfiction stories, we tell factual stories about the news of the day. We tell stories about the people that make the news, the people who populate our nation. That actually is a skill that translates so beautifully to video. It's a skill that translates to the 30 second to the three minute video that is now a huge part of the way that people consume information. And in some ways, I think that it translates more easily than if you're trying to make the jump from text to video. I think that this is an opportunity for us as NPR to do this as we've long been really excellent at conjuring up images in the mind.

  Now we can accompany that through the work that we do on video. The other piece is people trust our voices on air. They know the hosts and the reporters, they have a relationship to them. It's fun when we put their faces in front of folks, people are delighted to see who it is who's been in their ear for all of this time. I think that that trust relationship puts us head and shoulders above some of the other organizations that are trying to make this transformation. And I don't say that as a competitive thing. I think we can really lead the way in a way that feels unique to not just NPR but to public radio as a whole. So we're really excited about that and you'll be seeing more investment in this work as we go forward, both the long form work like Newsmakers, which is a new show that has come out just these past few months where we bring in some really interesting people to talk about what's going on in their world and our world, but also some of the short form stuff, I think some of our international correspondence dispatches have been really excellent in that regard.

  Katherine Maher

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  Yeah. Well, if you'd like to break news here today about any of those future plans, feel free to do so. But what would be the distribution channels for video? Well, obviously your website, your social channels, but can you talk a little bit about that?

  Tim Franklin

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  Yeah. So I think this, and this gets back to strategy, right? My view is that public radio and public media, and I say radio, I really think that we should rethink the way that radio is defined in the way that a phone is not really a phone, it's actually a computer in your pocket. Radio is audio. Radio is a way of being, it's a way of connecting. It's a sort of sense of real time intimacy and relevance. Public radio in my mind should be centralizing our audio and video production in a single digital home. And that single digital home, which can be a shared home for all of our stations, all of our work is really about making sure that that digital experience lines up with what audiences experience already in the content that we produce. So people have an expectation of integrity, of quality, of immediacy.

  I think that our digital experiences should reflect that and that's about moving people from these third party platforms, which we really see as top of the funnel opportunity into places where we can demonstrate the best experience for what it is that we're producing, whether that is a tiny desk or whether that is a local news report. It is giving people the thing that they're looking for in a way that brings them closer to the work that our extraordinary journalists are doing. And so for us, that is that investment in that digital backend that not just hosts NPR's content, but also hosts that content of all of our networks. So if you're somebody who's living in Chicago but you're originally from Des Moines, you can find that reporting that matters to you today, but also that connects you back to home.

  Katherine Maher

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  Yeah, absolutely. So last couple of quick questions. As I talk to news executives around the country, everybody of course is talking about AI and the impact of AI in news. Can you talk a little bit about how you're deploying AI both to help the business side and also within the newsroom itself?

  Tim Franklin

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  So like many organizations, we've been experimenting with AI. We've got our own suite of tools that our journalists and our staff are welcome to use. We are not producing anything that is going in front of our audience that has been written by AI or produced by AI. I just want to be really clear about that. That is a commitment that we have not just from a point of our values and the promise to our audience, but also that our union feels very strongly about. And so that's an important commitment. From our perspective though, AI can be very useful as a tool for our journalists. And so when the Epstein files were released, one of our interns actually coded up a really excellent backend crawl that allowed for us to go into those files and find stories and actually break some exclusives around that that wouldn't have been possible without the ability to do that kind of aggregation function that AI makes much easier.

  Katherine Maher

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  Yeah, absolutely. And so do you envision a time where AI could be used to create content or perhaps AI voices airing on NPR?

  Tim Franklin

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  I mean, that's a super sensitive issue, I think, on a whole host of levels. And I don't just mean for our colleagues, I mean, what are we actually promising to our audiences if we are putting AI voices in front of them? I think that there are abstract opportunities around language translation, but that would really require consent, consent not just from the journalists who are doing the work, but consent from audiences and knowing that this is a tool that increases accessibility rather than putting it in front of them without that transparency and that disclaimer. So AI, I think our adaptations of it will continue to evolve as it continues to be something that society responds to, but right now our commitment is really the humanity of what we do because we know that that is such a core differentiator of who we are. On the backend, I want us to be experimenting with how it improves our journalism, how it makes us faster, more agile, and all of that is sort of well within bounds, but as we present to the public, that trust is inviable.

  Katherine Maher

• 

  Yeah, absolutely. And so last question we talked about all the turmoil and everything with the defunding and everything else that's been happening. What makes you optimistic about the future of not just NPR, but about local news and your local stations around the country?

  Tim Franklin

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  That something like 85% of Americans believe in the value of local news. It is a nonpartisan agreement and it's one of those rare places where we do have that broad based agreement. I think that that's an extraordinary opportunity for us to build on. The amount of public support for public media that we saw in the past year was really significant. Even in Congress, that vote was just razor thin margins. We came so close to sustaining public funding. I am optimistic because I think I'm an inveterate optimist in the nature and quality of people, especially when we get to interpersonal relationships that we have and there's nothing better at interpersonal relationships than public radio. I mean, you have to actually hear a person. You can disagree with them, but when we're at our best, we're not asking you to make a judgment, we're asking you to actually listen and that is a tremendously transformative thing for us to engage in as a society.

  And so to me, that is a strength that we should be building on.

  Katherine Maher

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  Yeah, absolutely. Well, Katherine, thank you so much for sharing these insights with us today and taking the time, given especially how busy things are with you these days.

  Tim Franklin

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  Thank you.

  Katherine Maher

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  So you can find this in our other Medill State of Local News podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, and the Medill Local News Initiative website. I want to thank our supporters of the Medill Local News Initiative and this podcast, including MacArthur Knight and Joyce Foundations. And please join us next time when our guest will be Holly Moore, the executive editor of Axios Local. So until then, thank you.

  Tim Franklin

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