When Vivian Schiller took over National Public Radio last year the organization was reeling from its first budget-related mass layoffs since the 1980s and from escalating tensions with its local affiliates.
In the Columbia Journalism Review (March/April), Jill Drew writes that Ms. Schiller has re-energized the organization. Described in the article as someone with little ego who seeks to build consensus, Ms. Schiller has smoothed relations with local stations and put NPR on firmer financial footing.
She hired Ron Schiller (no relation) away from the University of Chicago to serve as NPR’s senior vice president for development. Referred to by some as “the Schillers,” the pair are pursuing “game-changing” gifts and are trying to work more closely with fund raisers at local stations, the Columbia Journalism Review says.
A second article in the latest issue of the Review looks at Herb and Marion Sandler, who used money from the 2006 sale of their bank, Golden West Financial Corporation, to bankroll the nonprofit journalism group ProPublica.
Staunch advocates for investigative journalism, the Sandlers balked when The New York Times, CBS, and other news-media outlets attacked them for their bank’s lending practices, which the reporters said contributed to the financial crisis. Jeff Horwitz, the author of the Review article, says that some of the Sandlers’ objections were founded and journalists rarely got the entire story right.
