Thomas Evans came to NPR a year ago to launch its editorial review desk. He will lead the newsroom starting in October.
University of Rochester
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University of Rochester
NPR has named a new news chief at a moment of uncertainty for the network, when it must adjust to the end of federal funding for public media on Sept. 30 — a move brought on by the Trump administration and Republican allies in Congress.
NPR has tapped Thomas Evans — widely called Tommy — a veteran of CNN’s international coverage who reported on conflicts for more than two decades. He arrived at NPR a year ago to launch its editorial review desk. The desk is charged with helping the newsroom ensure that its reporting is fair, accurate and contextual — in stories both on air and online, and in the full weight of NPR’s coverage.
“I had a lot of respect from beforehand, but these are really the best journalists in the country, if not the world,” Evans says in an interview. He says CEO Katherine Maher had charged him with maintaining the network’s core journalistic mission and making sure “that won’t be lost in the mix of just dealing with all the other maelstrom that’s coming at us.”
He says NPR needs to keep innovating in how it shares its journalism. But Evans says NPR should “lean into its strengths,” among them the deep subject knowledge of its reporters, hosts, producers and editors, its international coverage and its time-proven ability to tell stories compellingly.
Evans is to succeed NPR Senior Vice President and Editor in Chief Edith Chapin on Sept. 15. Chapin will stay on for a couple weeks to ensure a smooth transition, Maher says.
In announcing her intention this summer to step down, Chapin said she wanted a break from running the newsroom and serving as NPR’s acting chief content officer at the same time. She said her decision was not influenced by NPR’s financial concerns. NPR has indicated it intends to hire a full-time chief content officer but the job has not yet been posted.
Chapin and Evans first intersected a generation ago, when they both worked at CNN. She was a managing editor based in New York; he was a junior journalist who lived near Ground Zero of the Sept. 11 terror strikes in New York. Evans covered the aftermath of the attacks on foot for CNN; he was able to get close to the site because he was a resident of Lower Manhattan.
Suddenly, Evans says, CNN cared about his master’s degree from the University of London, as his dissertation was centered on Al Qaeda. A career in international journalism was born.
Financial challenges at NPR follow political anger
Evans’ arrival at NPR last year came in the wake of public and political outcry triggered by an essay critical of NPR’s news coverage. Uri Berliner, then a senior business editor at the network, wrote it for The Free Press, a news outlet that argues the mainstream news media has become biased.
While conservatives have periodically questioned the need to fund public media throughout its decades, Berliner’s essay provided a new rallying cry. Republicans on Capitol Hill attacked Maher – who had just become NPR’s chief executive – for her old social media posts. The NPR job is her first leading a journalism organization.
While she was brought in to NPR to shape a new strategy tailored for a digital age of listening, reading and viewing on demand, much of Maher’s time has been consumed by the fallout of that article and the attacks on public media funding that have accompanied the return of President Trump to the White House.
Chapin had long wanted to put in place a system of editorial checks similar to that at CNN. She seized the moment to hire Evans, who assembled a team of editors to review NPR’s journalism — both individual stories and podcasts —and to monitor the larger thrust of coverage.
At the outset, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting helped to pay for the initiative, though the funding soon waned. The CPB is a privately incorporated nonprofit with a Congressional charter to funnel federal tax dollars appropriated for public television and radio stations. PBS has typically received 15% of its funds directly from federal sources; NPR typically got between 1 to 2% of its money that way. Local stations, on average, have been bigger beneficiaries of federal dollars through CPB.
But all of that is going away on Sept. 30. At President Trump’s urging, Republican leaders in Congress pushed through what’s called a rescission, taking back $1.1 billion already set aside for public media (including NPR, PBS and local stations). CPB has announced it’s shutting down.
Maher has said as many as 70 to 80 stations may close; others may consolidate. And that will affect the strength, reach and resilience of the larger public radio system — now some 240-stations strong — and NPR itself. The network receives about 30% of its annual budget from fees local stations pay to run NPR’s programs.
A murky financial future
Asked about whether budget cuts will be necessary at the network, Maher demurred, saying she is to present a budget for the upcoming fiscal year, which begins Oct. 1, to NPR’s board of directors at meetings this week. The board is scheduled to vote on it on Friday. Maher has said publicly that NPR will write off about $8 million in fees from the stations in the greatest financial danger, but she says that’s not a budget cut. NPR’s annual budget currently stands at about $300 million.
Maher also said she is promoting NPR’s senior vice president for government and external affairs, Marta McLellan Ross, to be her chief of staff.
McLellan Ross has been praised by public radio station officials for galvanizing the campaign seeking to convince lawmakers to preserve federal funding for the public media system, though it proved unsuccessful. Now, she is to help Maher and the senior leadership team execute a new strategy for the current moment, though Maher has not yet revealed what it is to be.
NPR officials say they are not yet certain of the full effect of the federal funding cuts on NPR member stations and how that, in turn, will affect NPR’s finances. Many station managers say they received a boost in contributions from listeners following Congress’ rescission vote. But they are not convinced that level of giving will sustain over time.
A journalism career built around the world
In interviews, Maher says Evans brings an understanding of NPR’s network — yet has fresh eyes for how it could evolve.
“As the network and system for public media changes, the ability for us to change with that moment is going to be really important,” Maher says in an interview. “High quality, high integrity journalism is table stakes. But it is beyond that important to know what differentiates us, what makes us unique.”
She says Evans will help ensure NPR provides original and distinctive reporting across old fashioned platforms and new ones.
“This is somebody who had a good sense of where we are strong, a good sense of where we might grow, a good sense of what makes us different, and a good sense of where we might lean into that in the future,” Maher says. “He is unafraid to identify what it is at NPR that we should celebrate and invest in — as well as what we are going to need to change about ourselves in order to move into the next phase of what public media will become.”
After the Sept. 11 attacks, Evans’ career took off. For years, Evans reported on major developments throughout Europe and the Middle East, traveling to places like Iraq. Then he coordinated that kind of coverage as an international news executive for CNN based in London.
He rose to be CNN’s vice president for newsgathering responsible for Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America. He was also London Bureau chief. He has led reporting on stories including Brexit, the British royals and terrorist strikes in Europe, as well as ongoing tensions in the Middle East.
Before that, Evans had helped CNN set up bureaus in Kabul and Baghdad during the American-led invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq in the aftermath of the September 2001 terror attacks on the U.S.
“I have always thought of him as a tremendous leader and somebody whom I could go to at any time, with any question, and know that he is a valued adviser,” says Laura Bernardini, former head of global planning for CNN.
Bernardini says she first met Evans in New Orleans two decades ago, where he was producing stories for Anderson Cooper about the flooding and aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
“Every day they would go out and find a new story,” Bernardini says. “Each was more incredible than the last — and it would capture where the city was at that moment.”
Evans’s father was in the import/export business; his mother was an antiques dealer. He was born in Singapore, grew up in Thailand, and went to school in India, though he also spent time in the States.
Evans graduated from the University of Rochester in upstate New York and received a master’s in international politics from the University of London. His work at CNN has won numerous prominent recognitions, including Emmy, Peabody and Edward R. Murrow awards.
Disclosure: This story was written and reported by NPR Media Correspondent David Folkenflik. It was edited by Deputy Business Editor Emily Kopp and Managing Editors Gerry Holmes and Vickie Walton-James. Under NPR’s protocol for covering itself, no news executive or corporate official reviewed the story before it was posted publicly.