Christy Tanner has left New York Public Radio after eight months as chief executive, and the organisation has replaced her with three people – Jenna Weiss-Berman, Gary Knell and LaFontaine Oliver – sharing the job on an interim basis. Eight months is not long enough to have failed at anything. It is barely long enough to have learned where the budget lines are buried. When a tenure ends that quickly, the honest reading is that the role was impossible before the person arrived in it.
Public radio in America is carrying a structural problem that no chief executive can personally solve. The audience that built the institution is loyal, generous and ageing. The audience that will sustain it consumes audio in formats public radio did not invent and does not control, through platforms that keep the listener relationship and the advertising data. The funding model sits on membership drives, foundation money and public support, each of which responds to a different incentive and none of which responds quickly. Meanwhile the cost base is a newsroom, which is the most expensive and least compressible asset in media.
Whoever takes that job is handed a mandate containing two instructions that cannot both be followed. Modernise, which means spending money on distribution, product and talent that the current revenue does not cover. And stabilise, which means not spending money the current revenue does not cover. A board can hold both positions comfortably because a board meets quarterly. A chief executive has to act, and every action visibly serves one instruction at the expense of the other, which generates opposition from whichever constituency was not served. Eight months is roughly how long it takes for both constituencies to have been disappointed once.
This is the cafe with a famous house blend and a queue of regulars who have been drinking it for twenty years, located on a street where everyone under forty now wants single origin served three ways. Change the blend and you lose the people currently paying the rent, who will tell you exactly what they think and then go elsewhere. Keep it and you are running a museum with a till. The only real answer is to run both, properly, on the same machine, which requires more equipment, more training and more cash than the current turnover supports. Every new manager arrives certain they can sequence it. The sequencing is the job, and the sequencing takes longer than anyone’s patience.
The interim arrangement is the genuinely interesting decision here. Three leaders in place of one is usually read as indecision, but it can be something sharper: an acknowledgement that the role as previously defined was asking one person to be a content executive, a commercial executive and an institutional steward simultaneously. Splitting it temporarily lets the organisation find out which of those three functions actually carries the weight, with real people doing real work rather than a consultant producing a diagram. That is expensive information and it is the right information to buy before writing the next job description.
What it also does is lower the stakes of the next permanent appointment. A board that has spent six months watching three capable people divide the work knows considerably more about what it needs than a board that reads a search firm’s shortlist. The failure mode in nonprofit media leadership is hiring the profile rather than the function, repeatedly, and discovering each time that the profile was never the constraint.
New York Public Radio has, inadvertently, done the sector a service by making the problem visible at this speed. Eight months is a short enough tenure that nobody can blame the individual, which forces attention onto the architecture. That is where it belonged.
Source: The Hollywood Reporter, “New York Public Radio CEO Christy Tanner Steps Down”
