NPR News chief moves ahead on station partnerships, newsroom relations
One of the most important jobs in U.S. public broadcasting belongs now to a Canadian — Jeffrey Dvorkin, NPR's v.p. of news and information since last July. He succeeded Bill Buzenberg, a former NPR correspondent who ran the news division for seven years.
Dvorkin, 51, came from the Canadian Broadcasting Corp., where he had worked for two decades, rising to chief journalist and managing editor of CBC Radio News. For the CBC, he had been a sub-editor in London, a city hall reporter and producer in Montreal, a national producer in Ottawa and a senior writer/editor in Toronto. In 1989, he reported from Prague and Budapest during a freelance period before returning to the network. He earned two master's degrees in history, from the University of Toronto and the London School of Economics.
Dvorkin spoke with Current's Jacqueline Conciatore and Steve Behrens in his NPR office the day after President Clinton's first denials of accusations involving Monica Lewinsky. The transcript has been edited.
Current: You've been here about six months, and your colleagues are saying that you're candid, inclusive, and decent, among other positive things. What's coming up that could put an end to this extended honeymoon?
Dvorkin: (Laughs.) Well, honeymoons usually evolve into good marriages, and that's what I'm hoping will happen here. I'm very pleased with the people I've met, and the spirit of the place. There's this anecdote I've told once before: My 12-year-old was not thrilled to move to the states. And one Saturday we were unpacking books and things, and the radio was on, of course. It was the run of public radio — NPR and other. And after a few hours my son turned to me and said, "Well, I think I understand why you took this job. These people really have spirit.' He summed it up — this is a remarkable institution.
Could you describe a few examples of that spirit that you've heard on the air?
Well, I think yesterday's [Jan. 21] treatment of the Clinton story pulled together an extraordinary range of journalistic talent for the benefit of the listener. The interview that Robert Siegel and Mara Liasson did with the president was outstanding. It was trenchant and it was dignified. It had public radio values from the moment it began. The analysis of the legal and political position by Martha Raddatz and Nina Totenberg was a model of how those things are to be done.
At the same time, we were with the Pope in Cuba, and Tom Gjelten did phenomenal reporting. You couldn't have asked for a better day. Slightly crazy, but that's what makes it really interesting and terrific.
The Clinton interview had already been arranged to talk about other things?
That's right. But never let the agenda get in the way of a good story, so people pivoted and were flexible and changed tack and brought the real story out.
What changes has the news division made lately that listeners might not have recognized yet?
Well, we're in the process of implementing digital radio. What I'm hopeful it will do is allow us to expand the service by freeing up talent and resources to do more journalism in more places.
The other thing we're moving to do is create a series of bureau chiefs around the country, starting in the Midwest and the South, in the next month or so. This will not only be a first triage of journalism for NPR, but it will [have us working] with the member stations to develop local talent, to seek out news stories, to field-produce, and to act as trainer, coach and mentor for the journalists who often don't get access to really competitive, high-end journalistic experiences.
About digital — it sounds like you're expecting that editing will be less labor-intensive, which will free up some person-hours. Has that proven to be true elsewhere?
Well, the advantage to implementing digital at NPR is that it's not the way it was done at the BBC and certainly not the CBC. At BBC, radio has been abolished as a separate department. Digital was brought in so the BBC could offer an expanded service where radio and television journalists and producers were interchangeable. At the CBC, digital was brought in [with] tremendous cuts in the system, as a compensating mechanism. We're not faced with either of those situations here.
So the question for us is, how do we want to use this technology? What training requirements [do] we need, to give people the ability to put really interesting radio on the air, in a way that hasn't been done before? People start to invent radio, with digital; they start to invent how they can create the most extraordinary soundscapes for simple stories.
It's much easier to mix, to package, to do these things. And we've got an extraordinarily talented group of engineers in this place. I want to see them more involved in the journalism of this place, because digital will allow that to happen.
We'll do it in conjunction with all the unions involved to make sure people feel comfortable with this. Technological change makes people nervous, and there's been a track record of that so I understand why they're nervous.
The newscast unit was scheduled to switch this week. How did it go?
As you see, there's an empty bottle of champagne over there that says, "First digital (NPR) direct to air, 10:01 p.m.-10:06 p.m., Studio 3A, Jan. 14, 1998." We've done it. We've started the process.
That means the newscast was assembled on a keyboard?
And it was rolled from a keyboard.
How did the staff practice for that?
We set up a training model, with "super-users" — people who are part of the units, who will be the repositories of all of the information and intelligence about digital. So if people have forgotten something after the training, there will be this super-user who has had more intensive training.
You've talked about giving more attention to reporting outside the Beltway, and you're establishing bureau chiefs. What will the effect be of having a chief? You've had bureaus all along.
The chief will mostly serve as a news producer for NPR. This extends our reach into the region so we're able to get more news, to get stories on the air that haven't been told outside of that region.
My sense of this news service is that it has a lot of potential that is at this point untapped. I think that with a connection to hundreds of public radio stations, we have the ability to start building the most extraordinary national public radio news service in this country. It'll take time, it'll take training, it will take a lot of development and it will take a commitment from the member stations as well, but this is in their interests, too.
We already have opened the doors to a certain extent. In the last couple months there's been a 20 percent increase in the number of stories from NPR stations. And that doesn't include newscasts! That's just the programs. So it's already happening.
What we want to do is make sure the quality of journalism from all across the country is of a uniformly high standard. I don't think people should feel penalized for living outside the Beltway or not on the coasts — that they don't have the same quality of public radio as people do at larger stations. The real imbalance isn't Beltway and non-Beltway. The real imbalance is big stations and little stations. And that's the correction I'd like to start working on.
My real worry is that we have to move very directly to start to evolve this new system, because there isn't a lot of development of talent in the place. I'm worried that public radio, if it's not nurtured properly, will start to wither on the vine. That's my real worry, that we're not supporting it enough to turn it into something that's really vital and growing and continuous.
Has there been any withering already? Why would you think that's happening?
I want to make sure we put training courses in place that help people develop as journalists. I sent a trainer to the PRNDI [Public Radio News Directors] folk in Syracuse last November. It was a wonderful opportunity for them to learn some new tricks, and to develop some new radio skills, which their radio stations benefited from. We're also, at NPR, getting stories from these people, because there's a greater sense of partnership and a greater sense of ownership. So, it's altruistic, but only up to a point.
The CBC and the BBC have spent a tremendous amount of money on training to create a huge seedbed of radio journalists starting at the local level. That systematic approach doesn't exist here — yet. It would be wonderful if at a certain point down the road NPR and the stations created a kind of public radio university or ongoing training course or a squad of trainers that would travel around the country. Some of the radio journalists work under incredibly difficult circumstances.
Are you farther along with a particular station in setting up a partnership at this point?
No, not particularly. I've had discussions with New York, Boston, Atlanta, Chicago and Denver.
Colorado is in the process of developing a very interesting model involving eight stations. There's a lot of churn out there involving Colorado and local journalism, and this is the way we can start to insure our future.
In an article in the PRNDI newsletter last fall, you said that public radio needed to sound more like radio and less like print.
Yes. This is the thing that digital technology allows you to do. It allows for an easier implementation of sound. Sound has an editorial purpose. It's not just there for its entertainment value.
One of the things that I found astonishing is meeting with editors in radio who have had no real experience with sound. One editor told me he thought it was getting in the way of the story. And I was astonished at that and I said, "Well, what do you think sound is there for?" and he said, "I don't know." It struck me that we need more training for people both inside and outside NPR, to talk about what is a basic radio skill. What are we trying to accomplish? What should a piece sound like? What should a listener come away with after he or she has heard the story? To put more radio on the radio is critical, otherwise we may as well close the doors and give the building to the Washington Post.
Have you heard some work recently that had a lot of what you call "radiophonic" qualities?
There was a piece from one of the member stations just the other day. It was a piece from Maine. Following the ice storm. And it was sounds of rifle fire.
Cracking ice?
No! It was cracking trees! Whole trees were cracking. It was one of those stories that people will never forget.
Has there been a directive to shorten stories?
Not a directive. In discussions that I've had with producers, I keep asking them, "How's the listener receiving the stories? What are you trying to do and at what time of day?" People in the morning have less time to listen to the radio than in the evening, or on the drive home. And people are — I think — more amenable to longer stories when they have the time to listen to them. There'll always be that tension [over length]. That's why God invented editors.
Are you going to maintain the long segments — 20 minutes or more during All Things Considered — for those reports that deserve that much time?
I hope to be able to maintain that, as an option. The story would have to be pretty outstanding and compelling to run for 20 minutes. And the story should have its length based on its own merits, not because there's a segment in a clock that says we have this much time to fill.
Derek McGinty filled in a number of times at All Things Considered while Noah Adams has been away on leave. Did you talk with him about taking a reporting job or hosting role?
We did chat. He was keen to have a bash at television and I certainly understand that, having done it myself.
As for filling Derek McGinty's slot, have you heard from Jane Christo or Christopher Lydon? [Christo heads WBUR, Boston, which produces Lydon's morning talk show, The Connection, which was also a candidate for an NPR distribution slot.
Fairly recently. They were just general discussions.
McGinty producer WAMU says they're hiring a replacement for McGinty, "with NPR at the table." So will NPR's consent be required for their new host to keep McGinty's national slot?
We're doing an evaluation of all of the programs — both the ones produced inside the building and the ones not produced inside the building. We want to make sure we're providing the best possible news/talk mixture to the stations. We'll see where we go once those evaluations are complete.
If the program is going to be carried by NPR, it's got to be a collaborative partnership between WAMU and NPR. I'm not sure who has the upper hand on this. I don't see it as one having a veto over the other.
Who's doing this evaluation?
There's a group of producers and senior editors that have been asked to take responsibility for doing the evaluations with the programs. It's not people from outside coming in and doing a judgment. This is a very collaborative process.
You were on the public radio program On the Media in November and you admitted a weakness for cheekiness in radio, of the kind that CBC host Michael Enright indulges in, and a woman called in to say they don't appreciate such things in Iowa City. Is there a way to encourage just the right amount of cheekiness? Will you give a license for cheekiness to some of your people?
I don't think I have to give them any license. They've already got it.
Do they take it often enough, though?
They could a little more — I encourage all kinds of irreverence. I think if we lose our ability to acknowledge that humor is a major component of people's lives, we're in big trouble.
Noah Adams is on leave, and Larry Abramson, [National Desk editor], is on reporting assignment. Will they be returning to their positions or moving on to other things?
It's too soon to say.
Noah Adams is no longer scheduled to come back at the end of January?
Yeah, he's still scheduled.
What other major casting decisions do you have ahead?
There's the bureau chief positions that have to be filled, two for now and another two to come shortly thereafter, in New England and California. We've posted a correspondent's job in New Delhi, which we hope to fill quite soon. It's a new bureau with money redirected from internal shifts. And we're also about to have next month for the first time, a conference of National Desk reporters, who have never met as a group.
We heard you're bringing in some CBC people to talk about radio. Is that the occasion?
No. I had a colleague come in to work with the national desk some months ago. But I'm not importing the Canadians.
African-American journalists here have said they felt they were at war in the newsroom with the white majority, even in a reputedly open-minded institution like NPR. Are you finding evidence of this tension, and how are you responding?
Well, before I got here there was a staff survey of attitudes which landed on my desk as I walked in the door. It was pretty appalling because it stated quite openly that no one was really sure how the place operated. There was a sense of cronyism. No one knew who got jobs — why, when or how. So, I got here in August and by the first week of September I had an all-staff meeting to respond to the survey. And I met with a lot of people and we decided we'd do a number of things to change the way the place operated.
One was to get a director of news staffing, Cheryl Hampton, who I hired in late August. She comes from the Orange County newspaper, with a strong commitment to affirmative action and equity in hiring. The second thing was to make the hiring process more transparent.
You already post openings --
No, we didn't! The problem was, jobs would materialize on e-mail and disappear after a couple of days. They would not be posted in hard copy anywhere. The senior editors did the hires without any kind of reference to human resources, or to other colleagues in the place. So even though most of the hires may have been done scrupulously, there was a sense of insider-ness and being overly collegial. So I stopped that, and all positions now have to be posted in hard copy and electronically. They have to be up for three weeks. When the person is hired, it's done in front of a hiring board of news management and human resources staff members. When the results of that hire are completed, an announcement is made, so that there's a sense of completion.
And I've also made a commitment that I want to move people around. That people who end up on Morning Edition or All Things Considered aren't there forever. And I also want to do more secondments — we'll move people around temporarily, so people have a sense of motion in the place, so that it doesn't seem to be quite so cast in concrete.
Since that time the temperature has kind of cooled a bit. People come into my office all the time to let me know what's on their minds, and I'm told things are working better now.
The other thing is, there were a lot of people who had been in sort of permanent temporary positions, which just went on and on for years. We've stopped those, so that after 10 months or maybe a year the person has to be either confirmed in that position, or let go. So that we're not seen to be exploiting people.
We heard a story about conflict resolution in your newsroom, and wondered if you'd discuss it, either generally or specifically. A white program host wanted to change a word or two in a script, and the producer, who is black, objected strongly because of what the words mean to black people. Your resolution reportedly was that the host should stay home for the day and a substitute host would read the script as written. If this is anything like what happened, you are putting a great deal of weight behind sensitivity to feelings. Did something like this happen?
I don't want to comment on something that really was a matter between me and the people involved. But I do place a very strong —
Is this total fiction?
No, but I don't want to talk about it because it was a private matter and it was resolved. People have to feel at home in this place. They have to feel that they have the right to speak their minds, to have open and honest exchange of views. And then a decision is made and we'll move on. I won't tolerate a work environment that's hostile or discriminatory or anxiety-provoking. That is not acceptable at NPR.
There's a lot of appreciation, these days, for what competition can do. And NPR and Marketplace are increasingly competing in business news briefs. But some stations complain that it's duplicative — they're paying for both, but can't use both.
Well, the partnership principle may apply here as well. And the discussions that are still ongoing between PRI and NPR may result in some kind of combination. So we'll see where those discussions end up.
One of the best arguments against consolidation is that it reduces the number of entry points into national distribution or just the variety of programming. Fewer gatekeepers, fewer opportunities, less diversity. If there is a merger with PRI, how would you hope to maintain some of that advantage?
That's a real issue. We worked to redesign the way programming originated at the CBC. We felt that there weren't enough ways in which those new voices could come into the CBC. So we developed a series that was uniquely freelance-based. Ideas, which is a highly reputable program that's been running for 35 years on CBC. One hour a night, five nights a week. It can be anything from a two-week series on the public good to six hours on Jane Austen to a look at Native culture on reserves. It's ideas in its grandest sense.
I'd love to create some kind of vehicle like that here and am in discussions with [cultural programming chief] Murray Horwitz to see if we can figure out a way to create a nightly talks program. It would be thematic; it would be discussions. Again, to go back to the idea of partnership, since two-thirds of public radio stations are affiliated with universities and colleges, maybe we could take advantage of that —
Produced interviews?
Everything from [Dean Sanford] Ungar's [panels on media issues] at American University [to] drama, perhaps. But also some ideas. Something as wide-ranging as it's possible to do. To get the spoken word on the radio, to hear the human voice in all of its varieties would be terrific. I'm working with Murray to try devise something that the stations would find useful, especially in the evening when people have ideally even more time to listen.
You were talking earlier about training. How did you get the training you needed?
Through the CBC. I was constantly being sent to the training division for radio skills — writing, editing, producing, studio direction. There's even a course on how to hold a meeting, which is not as odd as it may sound. A lot of meetings spin their wheels and don't accomplish what they should set out to. There's a great training video that CBC has which is an As It Happens meeting that falls apart because Michael Enright decides to get a bit bolshy. It's quite hilarious. He delights a little bit in being the bad boy.
Staff members did not roll their eyes and say, "Oh, I have to go to training."?
I'm sure some did, but they were definitely a minority. I think everyone needs training, from the most junior copy clerk, to me and beyond.
Why did you leave the CBC in 1989 to go free-lance in Europe?
My wife had just finished her doctoral dissertation, and I'd been working in radio pretty much without a break for about five years at that point. Our son was three years old, so it was before the school system got its hooks into him. And my wife was between assignments as it were. So I took a leave of absence, and we hit the road.
Were you also drawn by what was going on in Eastern Europe?
It was an accident. We left in September, and nothing started to happen until November and we ended up living in Amsterdam, which was a great place to operate from, and we would fly over into Eastern Europe for a couple weeks at a time, and I'd do some reporting, and Liz and our son Eli would do some sightseeing. We had a wonderful time, just sort of knocking around and being footloose again.
They were sightseeing. There was no throwing of cobblestones or anything?
No, the museums were still open throughout all of this. There was this incredibly weird dichotomy between the normality of touring and tanks in the streets in other parts of town. It was very strange. This was in Prague and Budapest —
Was it on traffic reports in the morning: "Avoid Such-and-Such Square, there are tanks there"?
Public radio — I mean, I got involved in doing some training in Eastern Europe after that because the quality of public radio didn't exist. They knew they had to change for all of the obvious reasons. They were transforming from state radio to public radio. They needed to know how it was done. CBC was very generous with people, resources and money to help make that transformation. Some places have been more successful than others. Poland has made a remarkable transformation from state radio to public radio. It's a very lively, vital, cheeky radio service. Well, part of it is anyway; there's part of it that is still old-fashioned.
They haven't been entirely absorbed into the capitalist, go-go culture?
Oh, sure. They deregulated radio in Poland in 1993, I think, and overnight 35 radio stations appeared in Warsaw. Meanwhile, state radio kept its three or four channels and tried to compete in that environment. How did they do it? By making sure they had intelligent, complicated, contextual radio. It was very hard for them to do, because when they tried to do it in the past, many of them went to jail. Some of the bravest people I ever met were the radio journalists in Eastern Europe.
When you were hired by NPR, the first reaction of one station news director was, "Great, a Canadian! Now we'll have some decent coverage of Canada on NPR." How has NPR done at coverage of news up there, and do you have changes in mind? Like, sending a regular correspondent.
(Laughs.) No, I think that occasionally there will be stories of interest to Americans, but I don't see us setting up a bureau there. It isn't a place that I think commands a lot of interest among Americans.
I'm interested that someone said, "Now we'll have more news about Canada." I also had one station manager who deplored the fact that I'd come from Canada. He felt the use of language on the CBC was not appropriate, that it was rude and vulgar and sexual. His phrase for it was "groinal radio." I said it's a pretty conservative radio service. He said, "Well, I just hope you're not going to bring any of that here."
I said, "Well, I'll do my best, sir."
Has the board or management given you any more specific instructions than, "Go in there and do a terrific job?"
No, I spent a lot of time talking to them, saying basically the same things I'm saying to you. And they've been very encouraging and supportive. I can't ask for a better set of circumstances.
Rather than changing programming or adding streams of programming, is the most important thing to do to increase audience to get the people who would listen to it if they knew about it?
That's one thing. I think streams of programming is important. The radio business is changing pretty rapidly in this country. I don't think public radio should be too satisfied or too complacent, because the more successful we are, the more we will be imitated by others who have perhaps less sense of mission than we do. I think we want to make sure that the quality of public radio and public radio values are deep in the system and are accessible to as many people as possible. You do that by excellent journalism, wonderful programming and high-end technical production. We've got the talent to do it, we've got the scope and the breadth to do it, what we need is the kind of commitment from all aspects of the place, members stations and NPR, to make it happen.
After NPR announced Bill Buzenberg's departure, a prominent public radio newsperson wrote an opinion piece for Current that he later withdrew before publication. He wrote that Buzenberg and Del Lewis were inevitably on different teams, "fighting a battle they are supposed to wage" between journalistic and corporate values — freedom of information versus control of information, risking trouble versus maintaining stability. He said news executives "have one foot on each side of an ever-widening chasm" and "will eventually fall into the pit." This is certainly a dramatic picture to paint, but is there something true here about the news business in general? Is there an irreconcilable tension between large organizations and journalists who work for them?
Boy. First of all, I think that misunderstands Del Lewis. I think he has a very strong understanding and sense of commitment to public radio. I think to create that dichotomy between journalism and business is a false dichotomy. It is a manageable and creative tension. The reality is that public radio exists in the United States not because of the largesse of legislative bodies, although you need that largesse. But you need a combination of individuals, stations, governments, and corporations. And it can be a pretty wobbly chair to sit on. But it somehow works.
I think one of the most difficult things I've had to do is come to an appreciation of just how well it can work and just where it doesn't. I'm still learning.
I'm very confident. I wouldn't have taken this job to go through more of what I had just gone through at the CBC.
Meaning budget cuts?
Right. Del has been tremendously supportive of the news department. I can't speak more highly of him.
Where has it not worked?
I think it works overall. There's always a bit of push and pull, but there is tremendous desire among foundations and business to let public radio be public radio. Can we be more cheeky, can we be more challenging? Can we take more risks? Sure we can, and we have to. If we just blend into the landscape, if we just become another media choice without really being distinctive, that's where the real danger lies. I think we have to be out there really pushing and questioning and being appropriately skeptical. I want us to take more risks. I want us to take more chances. I want us to make connections for people. So that people listen to the radio and they say, "Aha! That's why that happened!"
The conflict of values that this public radio journalist was seeing — is it especially great in the U.S. because of American journalists' veneration of the First Amendment? You have pointed out that Canadians don't have an absolute First Amendment.
Well, a Canadian academic once said, we admire the First Amendment, but we don't worship it. I think that's not a bad approach. I think the First Amendment is an extraordinary institution. I also think it has to be married to a certain amount of accountability that journalists need to have so people understand why decisions were made and why stories were covered the way they were.
Accountability to?
To the public. I get a little nervous when the First Amendment is used as a kind of license to do some kind of journalistic event that has no accountability.
For fairness?
To be fair and balanced, to be seen to be fair and balanced in what we do. And to remember we're doing this on behalf of our listeners.
A recent article on the Canadian press seems to say that Canadian law directs attention toward ultimate goals like justice and civil peace rather than absolute press freedom, which is seen as a means to those ends. Is that part of the accountability? Being accountable for ultimate objectives?
I wouldn't say we're accountable for specific objectives, but I think we have to understand whose interests are being served when we do journalism. I think one of the important factors when we do our journalism is to understand why we're doing it, whether we're being prurient or salacious as opposed to being really interested in uncovering facts. There aren't any kind of concrete answers. You have to reinvent it each time you do a story and I'd rather have a First Amendment than not, so I'm very glad it's there. But I also am not a fundamentalist on the First Amendment.
What kinds of discussions have you had since you came here, pertaining to certain stories? What kinds of stories have raised issues that force you to sit down with a reporter and talk about how you handle it?
We had a longer discussion on embargoes [of news announcements]. I don't believe in embargoes. I think embargoes are used to manipulate the media. There are occasions when embargoes are useful — for example, it may take 10 days or two weeks to come to understand a complicated scientific story. And there are economic consequences to breaking an embargo on a budget, for example.
But there was a story on a lawsuit out west some months ago, where one of the lawyers gave one of our reporters information, but it was embargoed until 4 o'clock so he could get maximum spin on it. The reporter said, "Well, I signed a document, I agreed to it." And I said, "Well, I didn't and we're going to break it." And this created quite a hugger-mugger in the joint, but we had a really good discussion.
So you'll accept information on an embargo and then break the embargo?
I won't sign an agreement to embargo. And you know what? There's always four or five ways to get that information anyway. They leak all over the place. It's a way of self-aggrandizing a story; it's become one of those curious rituals that happens in the news business. For the most part it's pretty meaningless.
There's been a lot of discussion, since Princess Diana died, of what celebrity news is appropriate to cover. One reason given for covering celebrities is that they are a useful way of looking at human relations and everyday problems — divorce, infidelity, mistakes — that people need to consider and talk about. So this is just kind of like knowing the people down the block, except they have better hairdos. And that's a legitimate function of media, nothing like public policy, but it has some value to it. Everybody's interested in, "Did this football player really murder his wife?" — for what it tells us about life.
For African-American people, there is a whole different set of issues. I think that was the story worth telling, in a way, more than celebrity.
Tony Hall, the chief executive of the BBC, gave a wonderful speech at the National Press Club about the two kinds of news. There's new we do because we're connected, and we know things and we're kind of elitist and we can help explain the world to our listeners and viewers and readers. That's what the BBC mostly does, I think that's what NPR mostly does.
And Tony Hall said he thought we were totally caught off guard when Diana was killed. We did the story, and then we sort of settled in to wait for the funeral, but something else happened in that intervening weekend. There was this incredible outpouring of something, and after a couple of days, the editors came to him and said, "Something's going on, we're not covering it." And they were right.
This was the other kind of journalism, where the people were ahead of the journalists. Now if you only did that kind of journalism, I guess you could be accused of being tabloid. If you only do the high end, you get accused of being elitist. The trick for us as a news service is to find that balance, to find a way to execute our role, to show journalistic leadership. And to also understand what the people are concerned about. And every day in that 9:30 editorial meeting is that struggle to figure out what that balance is.
You think there's something legitimate in the interest in celebrities?
Up to a point. And up to a very careful point. But I thought the Diana funeral was important enough to send Bob Edwards over to cover it. Which provoked a bit of a shock here. The issue was, why are we doing this? We're not CNN. I said, "Of course, we're not CNN." And we had really smart people talking about what this meant to British society, how symbolic Diana was, and what the change meant, and this kind of outpouring of grief was a kind of expression of late Thatcherism, is what it was. It was a deeply held value within that society that Diana had come to symbolize.
That was a tremendous story, and it was great radio and Bob did a wonderful job, and I was really glad we were there. I want to be there for more of those kinds of stories. We probably will take the Pope's homily live from Havana on Saturday. That's the kind of story that has geopolitical significance, but it also touches people in a fundamental way, and NPR is absolutely perfect, perfectly situated to do these stories. And we'll do more.
Earlier news: NPR hires Dvorkin as news vice president,
succeeding Buzenberg, 1997.
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