Philly Radio: NPR's WHYY Has Lost Half Of Its Journalists

Thirty-four WHYY journalists signed a letter to top managers last February complaining about how they were running the newsroom at the biggest public media outlet in the region, reports The Philadelphia Inquirer.

The journalists complained of poor organization, lack of communication, and a focus on quick stories instead of the longer pieces that National Public Radio has long championed. “Inspiration, communication, and morale are low, while burnout, siloing, and attrition are high,” the letter said.

By the end of the year, 13 of the letter-signers, all members of a union that was then more than a year into negotiating its first contract with WHYY, had left. The contract was signed in September.

But, reports The Inquirer,  that doesn’t even capture the full extent of the exodus from WHYY, which had strong radio ratings at the end of last year. Since the beginning of 2021, at least 25 newsroom staffers — about half — have left or given notice, most recently a string of editors.

“The desire to retain our talented colleagues was one of the many reasons we formed a union and fought so hard for our first contract,” according to a statement from SAG-AFTRA, the union that represents about 75 WHYY employees, not all of them in the newsroom. “But WHYY has not addressed all the underlying issues contributing to turnover.”

In interviews, 10 former and six current WHYY staffers cited lower pay than at other media outlets, a lack of opportunities for advancement, a haphazard emphasis on short news pieces to the detriment of longer stories that attracted them to public radio, and a feeling that management is not firmly committed to podcasts and other newer approaches to journalism.

The turnover at WHYY has been happening during a time of volatility and disruption in local news media, including The Inquirer, as outlets here and across the country try to diversify their newsrooms and improve their coverage of communities of color — all while under pressure to find new ways to reach audiences and win their financial support.

The departures at WHYY include Sandra M. Clark, WHYY’s vice president for news and civic dialogue, who left Feb. 11 to become chief executive of StoryCorps, a Brooklyn nonprofit that records and shares the stories of ordinary Americans.

“It is not trying to flee `HYY. It’s not running away from anything, but I have an opportunity that I can’t pass up,” she said of her decision. Clark led WHYY’s efforts to diversify its on-air hosts and news staff and make the station sound more like the region it covers in part by encouraging more community contributors. And she has been praised by outside experts for those efforts.

Clark, a former managing editor at The Inquirer who started at WHYY in 2016, attributed the wave of resignations to the times: The Great Resignation hitting every industry, the intensity of news since 2020, a period of media experiments opening new opportunities, and the increasing availability of remote work.

Many of the staffers interviewed by The Inquirer agreed that large-scale socio-economic shifts — including remote work allowing people to change jobs without moving — contributed to the exodus. But departing staffers also said WHYY management was a major factor. None of the journalists would allow their names to be used for fear of reprisals that could hurt their careers.

Turnover and staff retention are challenges throughout the news industry, said Andrea Wenzel, an assistant professor at Temple University’s Klein College of Media and Communication. Wenzel is researching diversity, equity and inclusion as well as community engagement efforts at The Inquirer and WHYY in the context of larger efforts to make local journalism more equitable and antiracist.

“It’s tricky to make it a neat and tidy story about WHYY. They have some big challenges, but they are not alone,” Wenzel said. It’s the media landscape of the moment.