January 13, 2025; Washington, D.C. – NPR President and CEO Katherine Maher announced today that Ryan Merkley, an experienced executive leader with a strong commitment to civic institutions, will become NPR's Chief Operating Officer. The Member Partnership, Network Growth (including the NPR app and New Platform Partnerships), Technology Operations and Distribution, and Product and Audience Technology teams will report to this role, which will also oversee NPR's AI strategy. This portfolio brings together the teams that are leading the way in how NPR builds a truly national public media network, and reaches and serves audiences into the future. Merkley will also be responsible for institutional planning and performance.
"I believe deeply in collaboration - especially things we can only do together - and I've spent my career in organizations that do just that. Public media is a collective effort, beginning with communities and local stations across the country, and connecting across the network," said Merkley. "Public media and its unique mission of service is essential to give people the information and context they need to make choices about their lives and their families, and to understand each other at home and around the world. We need that connection and understanding more than ever, and I'm so inspired by this team and our mission to ensure we protect and grow it."
"Throughout his career Ryan has demonstrated a commitment to the public trust, leading organizations that prioritize universal access to the common good. He has a proven track record in helping companies with ambitious missions achieve high-performance outcomes, and his success working with complex distributed network organizations and fluency in product and emerging technologies make him an ideal COO for NPR at this moment in time," said NPR CEO Katherine Maher. "I look forward to working with Ryan to build the NPR Network into a truly national public media network with local audience services at its core, and to develop and sustain the technologies that make this work possible."
Before coming to NPR, Merkley was CEO of Conscience, a biotech non-profit that uses AI and collaborative science to address areas of market failure in drug development. He was previously Senior Technology Fellow at the Aspen Institute, working across a variety of topics, including AI, open source, intellectual property, data and privacy, and information integrity. Merkley was Chief of Staff at the Wikimedia Foundation from 2019 to 2021. Prior to that he served for five years as CEO at Creative Commons, where he developed and launched CC Search, cataloging over 300 million works in the commons, including masterworks from the NY Met, Smithsonian Institution, and Rijksmuseum. He was Chief Operating Officer of Mozilla, served as Director of Corporate Communications for the City of Vancouver for the 2010 Winter Games, and was a Senior Advisor to Mayor David Miller in Toronto, where he led the Mayor's budget policy and initiated Toronto's Open Data project.
Merkley is a fellow of the Harvard Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, focused on understanding disinformation and misinformation in the knowledge ecosystem, and the founding chair of the Flickr Foundation.
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