CEO led NPR through COVID-19 pandemic : NPR

Former NPR chief executive John Lansing died Wednesday at his lakeside home in Wisconsin, just six months after relinquishing his role at the network and just two weeks after turning 67 years old. His cause of death was not immediately disclosed.

Lansing, previously admired for a long career in broadcasting and cable television, stepped down this past spring from NPR after a turbulent four-and-a-half year stint.

At NPR, Lansing tangled with titans, kept the network’s shows on the air during a global pandemic, navigated intense social headwinds, oversaw an ambitious expansion of digital ambitions and steered NPR through what he defined as an “existential” financial crisis.

His successor, NPR CEO Katherine Maher, said Lansing rose to the moment.

“He had a tremendous impact on NPR’s workplace culture, understood the importance of NPR’s mission to support democracy by informing the American public, and led the organization to rise to the challenge of an unprecedented global pandemic,” Maher told staffers in a note.

Despite layoffs and buyouts of 10 percent of the staff in early 2023, Lansing earned praise from an unexpected source: the newsroom union’s chief.

“I thought he did a good job,” Pat O’Donnell, executive director of SAG-AFTRA Washington-Mid Atlantic local, said after Lansing announced he would retire. “He did the best he could. Crisis after crisis — oh my God.”

The union chief cited Lansing’s constant communication with staff during the pandemic, his conciliatory approach to negotiations, his emphasis on diversity, and his willingness to ensure the network offered laid-off employees more generous severance terms than required under the existing contract.

Lansing got his start in journalism at the age of 17 as a studio technician and camera operator for a local television station in Louisville. He soon became a videographer and rose through the ranks of local TV newsrooms, as a news director and ultimately a top official for E.W. Scripps Co. over the local stations. He later became president of the Scripps Networks, which owned such stations as the Food Network, HGTV and the Travel Channel.

In 2015, he became the chief of the U.S. Agency for Global Media, the government outfit that oversees such federally funded international broadcasters as the Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and Radio Free Asia.

When Lansing arrived at NPR in 2019, he came with a moral imperative that concurrently served as a business strategy: the need to diversity the staff, its programming, its story selection and its audiences to better reflect American life. He called it his North Star.Lansing elevated female hosts’ salaries to help them keep pace with their male counterparts – and then became personally involved in contract negotiations after several prominent women hosts of color left the network.

That resulted in significant part from the increased emphasis peer news outlets, including the New York Times and CNN, are placing on audio – creating a far more competitive marketplace for talent than Lansing’s predecessors faced.

Lansing’s North Star led to a significant shift in workforce hiring and notable changes in demographics for NPR’s workforce and leadership team. It has not yet been accompanied by anticipated increase or concomitant diversification of the network’s audiences.

He made the pitch and the push from the outset, months before the social justice protests that swept through U.S. streets, workplaces and even newsrooms starting in 2020 after the murder of George Floyd.

Yet the initiative ultimately became wrapped up in a national debate over NPR, when then senior business editor Uri Berliner accused the network under Lansing of failing to consider viewpoint diversity even as it pursued greater racial and ethnic representation.

Lansing replied: “The philosophy is: Do you want to serve all of America and make sure it sounds like all of America, or not? I’d welcome the argument against that.”

Lansing did not shy from arguments. In January 2020, when then U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo falsely accused All Things Considered host Mary Louise Kelly of lying to listeners, Lansing publicly defended her and the network, on the record.

“Mary Louise Kelly is one of the most respected, truthful, factual, professional and ethical journalists in the United States,” Lansing told Morning Edition’s Michel Martin. “And that’s known by the entire press corps. And I stand behind her. And I stand behind the NPR newsroom. And the statement from the secretary of state is blatantly false.”

Similarly, Lansing withdrew all of NPR’s formal feeds on X, formerly Twitter, after new owner Elon Musk moved to designate the network “state-affiliated media,” the same term it uses for propaganda outlets in Russia and other autocratic states.

Musk later revised the label to “government-funded media.” (NPR typically receives less than 1 percent of its $300 million annual budget from the federally funded Corporation for Public Broadcasting.) But Lansing had seen enough. He said he was protecting its credibility and its ability to produce journalism without “a shadow of negativity.”

Later reviews found no appreciable effect on the network’s online audiences from the institution’s withdrawal from the site.

NPR’s chief communications officer, Isabel Lara, wrote Lansing had led the network during some of its hardest years as an organization.

“I learned so much about leadership from him; he just made you want to do your best,” Lara said. “He loved journalism and was proud to defend our editorial independence when it was attacked.”

Despite covering the growing threat of Covid-19, NPR was not prepared for the pandemic, which reached the U.S. just months into Lansing’s tenure.

Lansing later said he was advised by top aides it might take NPR another six months to build back full broadcast capability remotely, with hosts operating live from home studios. They got it done in a week.

The decision to hold weekly all-staff meetings “was the glue that held the culture together during a time when the mission had never really been more important,” Lansing said.

NPR received private and public funds to cover the war in Ukraine and has maintained a strong presence there.

In late 2022, the wheels looked as though they would come off, however; Lansing initially warned that all hiring would be frozen and all but essential travel curtailed; early in 2023 he revised his projections far downward, saying that the networks’ underwriting revenues had imploded for podcasts.

Lansing was initially condemned for failing to see the budget crisis coming.

But NPR proved to be on the cutting edge of a media collapse, as corporate advertisers slashed budgets ahead of a recession that has not, to date, transpired. Other major news outlets have been hit even harder. The Washington Post laid off or bought out about 13 percent of its staff last year. The Los Angeles Times has cut about a third of its staff over the past two years. New York Public Radio just announced job cuts of 8 percent of staffers – on top of 10 percent last year.

Ultimately, many staffers concluded Lansing had handled that relatively humanely, with constant updates about budget realities, alterations to meet staffers’ concerns and voluntary buyouts.

In quest for new revenues, NPR expanded its entrepreneurial efforts, for example striking a deal with Amazon Music to run the Guy Raz podcast How I Built This exclusively for a week before it is released to the public. Similarly, NPR has now licensed its Tiny Desk Concert format in South Korea and Japan.

Lansing also pushed a greater integration with NPR’s hundreds of member stations throughout the country, creating what he called the NPR Network.

Colleagues recalled Lansing in a more personal way in the wake of the announcement of his death.

“John was a true friend who led a life of integrity and love,” said Keith Woods, NPR’s chief diversity officer. “He made me want to match his conviction and his special ability to keep the things that truly mattered — his family, his friends, the people he served as a journalist and a leader — at the center of his universe.”

In her note to staffers, Maher wrote that she had only met Lansing just once.

“We broke bread together and I pestered him with my rudimentary questions,” she said. “He was generous with his insight and optimistic about our future. Later when things were difficult at the start of my tenure, he made a point of reaching out to cheer me on. It meant a lot to hear from someone who had sat in the chair before, and I wish we’d had more time together.”

Lansing is survived by his wife Jean, and their children Alex, Jackson, Nicholas, and Jennifer.