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Tomorrow, NPRs CEO Katherine Maher goes before a DOGE congressional subcommittee to defend the public media outlets case for federal funding. Maher gives a preview to her testimony, sharing how funding cuts would impact Americans broad access to crucial news and information, particularly in rural and local areas. Maher also reveals NPRs strategy for reengaging with their audience, how the organization can better frame its identity as an outlet for all Americans, and more. This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response, hosted by the former editor-in-chief of Fast Company Bob Safian. From the team behind the Masters of Scale podcast, Rapid Response features candid conversations with todays top business leaders navigating real-time challenges. Subscribe to Rapid Response wherever you get your podcasts to ensure you never miss an episode. When you joined NPR last year, the organization faced plenty of business challenges: audience engagement, business model. Since then, the environment just got a whole lot more fraught. There was a high profile criticism about newsroom bias last spring from an editor on the staff. That sounds almost quaint right now though. You’ve been called to testify on Capitol Hill tomorrow to speak before the DOGE subcommittee in a hearing titled “Anti-American Airwaves,” alongside the head of PBS. What do you expect from that? What should we all expect? How do you prepare for that? Honestly, I view it as an opportunity. I view it as an opportunity to go and talk about all the great work that NPR does, but also the great work that our stations do. I think that that’s something that often gets lost in the conversation about public radio is the overall percentage of funds that go directly to local stations. The importance of the local station network, and the fact that when people are listening to public radio, they are not listening to us broadcasting from D.C., they’re listening to their local station, which is probably, chances are, attached to a local university. Or it’s a community nonprofit, and it’s making the choices about what folks hear on the air. It probably has some call-in public affairs show where you can talk about what’s going on that matters to you as a resident of your town, your city, et cetera. So, just really getting back to that, that feels like such an important part of what I’m there to do. And, how do you prepare? I mean, you prepare by making sure you know what you’re there to say, and you prepare by making sure you know what it is that you want to be able to communicate about the value of the work, and you prepare by a lot of practice. It’s like trying to go to Carnegie Hall. It’s a lot of practice. I was talking to a friend about doing this interview. He was telling me a story about talking to a colleague who’s a MAGA republican, and he mentioned an episode, he said, “Oh, I’ll send you this episode of This American Life.” And they were like, “Oh, it’s on NPR. Oh, no.” It almost sounds like there are people who are listening to NPR stations that maybe don’t realize they’re NPR stations, or don’t connect it to this conversation about, I don’t know, it being anti-American. I really want to rebuff this idea that in any way that public radio is anti-American. For starters, we are a uniquely American model. We are a public-private partnership. For every single federal dollar we get, local stations raise an additional seven. They rely on their communities, they rely on local businesses. NPR is 25% of what you hear on public radio airwaves on average. In fact, 75% of stations programming is either other shows that they purchase or local shows that they produce. And, This American Life is a great example. We love This American Life. I heard Glass used to work at NPR. But it’s not an NPR program. It is a public radio program. It’s part of the diverse texture of what is actually available. There’s 1,300 public radio stations across the country. They represent their local communities in ways that are hyper unique, whether we’re talking about high school basketball, the price of sorghum wheat. It’s easy to forget about if you’re just listening to the radio in perhaps New York or a D.C., is that all of this is very much in tune with whatever’s going on in American lives at any particular point in time in this enormous nation of ours. NPR isn’t a federal agency, as you have said. You get money from lots of different places. But, the subtext of this DOGE hearing is the prospect of losing federal funding or some important part of it. What would the practical impact of losing that funding be? I can imagine you’ve been preparing for this possibility even well before this hearing came up. We have to be prepared for all scenarios all the time. The thing that I would want everyone to know about federal funding is the impact that loss of federal funding would have on local stations. 121.5 million goes to public radio on an annual basis, it’s a lot of money, I want to acknowledge that. And it’s also not a ton of money relative to the total size of the American public budget, right, the federal budget, a 100 million of that goes direct to local stations. And, disproportionately, the percentage of those funds goes to support stations that serve rural communities, that serve less affluent communities, that serve communities with really large areas of service, where the infrastructure investment in making sure that broadcast airwaves reach the country is significant. I think about my colleagues in Eastern Kentucky who have to put repeaters and hollers in order for Eastern Kentuckians to be able to hear those radio broadcasts. The loss of federal funding would directly impact the ability for stations to provide coverage, which currently 99.7% of the nation has access to airwaves. It would directly affect our ability to be part of the emergency broadcast system, and it would directly affect the ability of local stations to be able to continue to support commission and purchase programming about their communities. That’s where the harm would be. The harm would be for the local stations, and that’s what we’re trying to avoid, because it’s very easy, again, in D.C. to forget that we’ve lost a third of newspapers across the country in the last 20 years. One fifth of Americans live in a news desert. Public radio, public broadcasting, your local newsroom is often the only news that folks have that actually cares about their community and covers the issues that lsteners care about. You’re for all Americans, but you had an editor at NPR say, “No, the news has been biased.” The way you talk about COVID, or the Mueller report, or whatever. There is this impression from certain people in America that NPR is not for all Americans, and obviously, that’s what the hearing’s about tomorrow. Yeah. And that’s one of the reasons that I’m here: I believe very deeply that that is our objective and our responsibility. I had someone come up to me and they said, “I’m a conservative. I grew up on NPR. I love NPR. And I’m just not sure it’s a home for me right now.” And that struck me. That cut me to the core. I want it to be a home for everyone. I want people to feel as though it’s their home for curiosity, it’s their home for understanding the world. Certainly, that’s the role it played in my life as a young person. So, for starters, we have really reoriented the organization around audience needs. Broadcast radio is not the greatest way to understand audience needs because we just don’t have that much information about how people are listening. But as we have more digital data around people who are coming to our websites, or listening to our podcasts, or even just streaming from our app, those linear radio experiences, it starts to be able to help us understand how to better serve audiences. In the past, the only audience research that we did was with people with college degrees, but only 35% of Americans have a college degree, which meant that we were not listening to the needs of all Americans. How do you run a media organization and say, “65% of my potential audience, I’m not going to ask them what they want.” So we’re doing that, which I think makes a really big difference. The thing that we’ve identified in terms of our audiences is that curiosity is the most common characteristic. And the great news is that curiosity is not a partisan trait. Curiosity exists in every demographic, every age group, every political persuasion. And so, that’s a great place for us to hone in on our curiosity. What’s going on in the world? How do we explain it? How do we give people the information to go a little bit deeper, give them that context that helps them situate themselves? And I think it’s time for us to reintroduce ourselves as if this is what we’re here to do, and yes, we’re here to do it for everyone. How’s the mood and morale on your team these days? They’re here to go to work. I just walked through the newsroom to get here to the studio, and everyone’s heads down, they’re working, they’re reporting, they’re producing, they’re getting ready to file their story for All Things Considered, or they’re getting ready for whatever band is coming in for Tiny Desk next. I think that the overall environment right now is that people really want to do the work. There’s a lot of news in the world today, whether we’re thinking about the transformative administration, whether we’re thinking about questions of space exploration. I think people feel as though, of course, this is a different moment in time, and it is really important that we show up and are responsive to people’s questions about the value of our work. I come back to the fact that when we talk about efficiency, public radio is remarkably efficient. The cost per public media per American is $1.60. It’s basically when you go to check out at CVS and you’re asked to round up to a good cause, that’s us. That’s what we cost. Public radio costs less than $1.60, the public media as a whole is $1.60 per American per year. As I said, for every dollar of federal funding, $7 of private funding. We’ve got a good story to tell, and 75% of Americans want to see public media maintain or increase its current funding levels. So, again, I think that’s the story we’re here to tell.
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E-Commerce
A private European aerospace company scrubbed its attempt on Monday to launch the first test flight of its orbital launch vehicle from Norway.Unfavorable winds meant that the Spectrum rocket couldn’t be launched from the island of Andya in northern Norway, Munich-based Isar Aerospace said.The launch is subject to various factors, including weather and safety. The company said it could also conduct the test flight later in the week. Another date hasn’t yet been set.The 28-meter (91-foot) Spectrum is a two-stage launch vehicle designed for small and medium-size satellites.The company has largely ruled out the possibility of the rocket reaching orbit on its first complete flight, saying that it would consider a 30-second flight a success. Isar Aerospace aims to collect as much data and experience as possible on the first integrated test of all the systems on its in-house-developed launch vehicle.The startup, which says it has raised more than 400 million euros ($435 million) in capital, hopes to build up to 40 launch vehicles per year in the future at a plant outside of Munich. The launch vehicles are all to be used for putting satellites into orbit.Isar Aerospace is separate from the European Space Agency, or ESA, which is funded by its 23 member states.ESA has been launching rockets and satellites into orbit for years, but mainly from French Guianaan overseas department of France in South Americaand from Cape Canaveral in Florida.
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E-Commerce
Described as the worst U.S. security breach in a generation, the leak is an unprecedented failure for the White House. For several days, a journalist from The Atlantic had unrestricted access to a private Signal group chat involving the highest levels of governmentdiscussing, in real time, an imminent U.S. military strike on Houthi rebels in Yemen. And no one in the administration had a clue. Investigations are already underway to determine how such a blunder could happen. But the core issue requires no deep forensic analysis: the failure was human. According to reports, The Atlantics Jeffrey Goldberg was mistakenly added to a Signal chat that included the presidents national security adviser and the secretary of defenseapparently because National Security Adviser Michael Waltz misidentified Goldberg (whose display name was simply J.G.) as a government official. Its a pretty egregious failing, says Robert Pritchard, a former deputy head of the U.K.s Cyber Security Operations Center. While apps like Signal or WhatsApp offer strong encryption and are widely used for coordination, Pritchard notes that such tools are not appropriate for sensitive or classified communicationnot because the apps themselves are insecure, but because the devices and, crucially, the users are. Or, to put it more bluntly: the problem is the people using them. Signal is no substitute for good operational security, says Alan Woodward, a cybersecurity professor at the University of Surrey. Invite someone to your chat group, and of course they can read everything. The potential fallout is enormous. It may sound extreme, but this is the sort of failure that could get people killed, warns Woodward. Its fortunate the journalist chose not to share all the information and waited until after the relevant events unfolded.” Beyond the immediate security risks, the episode reveals a deeper institutional problem: the lack of transparency and proper recordkeeping when government business is conducted on third-party messaging apps with disappearing messages. Even more troubling to some experts is the likelihood of it happening again. Human mistakes happenand they will continue to happen, says Lukasz Olejnik, an independent cybersecurity consultant and visiting senior research fellow at Kings College London. And policies will be violated. What comes next is unclear. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has publicly claimed no war or attack plans were shared in the chatsomething The Atlantic‘s Goldberg disputes, calling the statement a lie. I would imagine there is a big clean-up operation ongoing right now, says Pritchard, the former Cyber Security Operations Center deputy. “All those devices need to be wiped, including any secondary devices that have the same Signal account accessible on them, and there need to be investigations into what else has gone on on Signal.” But cleanup may be to little, too late. After all, the leaked chats are a goldmine for adversaries. Among the damage is a leak of fragments of information potentially allowing people to compose a psychological profile of U.S. leaders, says Kings College London’s Olejnikfrom their emoji use to the vice presidents candid feelings about Donald Trump. In the end, this wasnt a failure of technologyit was a failure of judgment. And it may take more than a wiped device to repair the damage.
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E-Commerce
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