John Lansing, Who Guided NPR Through Tumultuous Times, Dies at 67

John Lansing, Who Guided NPR Through Tumultuous Times, Dies at 67 - The New York Times

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John Lansing, Who Guided NPR Through Tumultuous Times, Dies at 67

He led the broadcasting organization during the coronavirus pandemic, a decline in revenue and a period of extreme political polarization.

John Lansing, who as chief executive of NPR from 2019 until earlier this year guided the broadcasting organization through a global pandemic, an imploding media landscape and widening political polarization that called into question some of its journalistic principles, died on Aug. 14 at his home in Eagle River, Wis. He was 67.

An NPR representative confirmed the death but did not cite a cause.

Mr. Lansing, who had been in the news business since he graduated from high school, arrived at NPR with a mission to broaden its reach beyond traditional radio into media like podcasts and newsletters.

He also announced what he considered his “north star”: a commitment to expand NPR’s audience to include a younger and more diverse demographic, and a parallel commitment to diversify, equity and inclusion in its coverage, sources and staff.

His changes included documenting the diversity of sources, introducing unconscious bias training and hiring people of color for both on- and off-air positions.

“I felt that we needed to double down our efforts in D.E.I. throughout our organization in order to fulfill the promise to reflect the entire American public in terms of what America looks like,” he told Current, a magazine covering public media, in 2021.

Mr. Lansing started as NPR’s chief executive in October 2019 and was still settling into the role when the Covid pandemic hit. It presented a very different challenge: Radio listenership declined precipitously with the shift to remote work, and NPR developed a $25 million deficit as corporations pulled back sponsorship dollars.

Mr. Lansing was told it would take six months to transition to fully remote operations; under his guidance, the process was finished in a week. He froze dues and fees for NPR’s hundreds of member stations, and instituted weekly staff-wide Zoom chats to keep up morale.

The economic echoes of the pandemic continued to wreak havoc on the news media over subsequent years, NPR included. In an attempt to avoid layoffs, he slashed salaries of top executives, including a 25 percent cut to his own, and later instituted a hiring freeze.

It wasn’t enough, however, and in 2023 he laid off 10 percent of NPR’s work force— about 100 positions — and halted the production of four podcasts. He kept in close contact with SAG-AFTRA, the union that represents a majority of NPR’s workers, and won its praise for his transparency and poise.

“He was the most levelheaded person in the room,” Steve Inskeep, a host of NPR’s “Morning Edition,” wrote in an email. “Just never lost his cool, that I saw. He took pride in his background as a working journalist and brought that experience to his job as an executive.”

NPR’s difficulties were more than economic. As the nation’s premier public broadcasting network, it became a lightning rod during and after the Trump administration, and Mr. Lansing put himself forward as the organization’s chief advocate.

He vociferously defended Mary Louise Kelly, a host of “All Things Considered,” in 2020 after Secretary of State Mike Pompeo accused her of lying to him in an interview. And after Twitter labeled NPR a “state-affiliated media” organization in 2023, he put a stop to all new posts on its 52 feeds on the platform. (NPR receives less than 1 percent of its budget from federal funding.)

“It would be a disservice to the serious work you all do here to continue to share it on a platform that is associating the federal charter for public media with an abandoning of editorial independence or standards,” he wrote in a memo to NPR’s staff.

Mr. Lansing announced in September that he was stepping down as chief executive, but that he would remain in place until a successor was found. His last day was March 22, three days before Katherine Maher, the new chief executive, succeeded him.

Less than a month later, Mr. Lansing was again in the news after a senior NPR editor, Uri Berliner, wrote an article for The Free Press criticizing him, in part, for overseeing a decline in “viewpoint diversity,” even as Mr. Lansing leaned into race and identity.

Mr. Lansing refused to budge.

“The philosophy is: Do you want to serve all of America and make sure it sounds like all of America, or not?” he told NPR in response to Mr. Berliner’s article. “I’d welcome the argument against that.”

John Francis Lansing was born on July 31, 1957, in Minneapolis. His father, William, was in sales, and his mother, Catherine Ann (Cavanaugh) Lansing, was an administrative assistant. When John was 5, his family moved to St. Louis, then later to Paducah, Ky.

Two days after he graduated from high school, he got a job at a local TV station. He was hired as a studio technician, at minimum wage; his first job was painting the station’s exterior.

He soon moved up to cameraman, then went on to increasingly senior jobs at stations around the Midwest, including in Louisville, Ky.; Grand Rapids, Mich.; Minneapolis; and Chicago.

While in Louisville, he enrolled at Bellarmine University, but left in 1985 just a few credits short of graduating. He returned decades later, and received a bachelor’s degree in communications in 2009.

Mr. Lansing married Jean Rausch in 1993. She survives him, as do their children Alex, Jackson, Jennifer and Nicholas.

Mr. Lansing spent some 20 years as an executive with E.W. Scripps, first in a role overseeing local stations and then as president of the Scripps Network, responsible for cable channels including the Food Network and HGTV.

In 2015 he became the head of the Broadcast Board of Governors, (now the U.S. Agency for Global Media), which oversees government-sponsored media like Voice of America and Radio Free Asia. He remained there until 2019, when he joined NPR.

When an NPR reporter asked about his impression after he arrived, he replied, “I thought, wow. How cool is it to be at NPR?”
National Public Radio