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NPR CEO Jarl Mohn On What He's Learned Since Taking The Reins

Stephen Voss
/
NPR
Jarl Mohn has a diverse media background and was offered the top job at NPR about a year ago.

Jarl Mohn is just two weeks away from the anniversary of getting the top job at NPR. For this week’s Friday Conversation, he talks about his first year at the network, what he learned from running E! Entertainment television, and how he hopes to position NPR in a radically changing media landscape.

Interview Highlights: Jarl Mohn On...

…what surprised him during his first year on the job

“I think more than anything, maybe it’s not a surprise but a validation of something that I thought was really important, and that’s how important the kind of journalism we do in public radio, what you do at KERA and what we do here at NPR, is. Across the country all the communities that we visited, the amazing commitment to local journalism that our member stations have."

…how he’s trying to change the relationship between network and stations:

“What I’m attempting to do, what I’m trying to do, and what we’re trying to do across our whole organization is the one-on-one relationships. You can’t replace those, if you don’t have that, the rest of it is kind of difficult to do. So I spend half my time, every other week is on the road, in radio stations, just trying to find out what’s important, what’s going on in that market. And every market is different, the issues and the challenges of each market are very, very different.”

Courtney Collins has been working as a broadcast journalist since graduating from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University in 2004. Before coming to KERA in 2011, Courtney worked as a reporter for NPR member station WAMU in Washington D.C. While there she covered daily news and reported for the station’s weekly news magazine, Metro Connection.
Rick Holter was KERA's vice president of news. He oversaw news coverage on all of KERA's platforms – radio, digital and television. Under his leadership, KERA News earned more than 200 local, regional and national awards, including the station's first two national Edward R. Murrow Awards. He and the KERA News staff were also part of NPR's Ebola-coverage team that won a George Foster Peabody Award, broadcasting's highest honor.