Our Ongoing Work

At NPR, diversity is not a special project — it is our core work.

Through the work of Chief Diversity Officer Keith Woods, Vice President of DEI Whitney Maddox, NPR's People Team and hundreds of staff members across the organization, we strive to deliver on our longstanding commitment to “look and sound like America.”

To do that, we work to integrate the values of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in all that we do – in the workplace, in serving our audiences, in our staffing, and in the stories, interviews, visuals, and social media posts that feature NPR’s high-quality content.

Workplace Training and Education

• Throughout 2024, we have worked to help colleagues across public radio to uphold the values underlying this work as changes in laws, policies and workplace practices challenge those values. We have gathered with station colleagues to collectively ground the work of diversity, equity and inclusion in the foundational ideals of public service that undergird public media. Those ideals include informing the full community through news and information, reflecting and connecting with the people we serve, and engaging audiences in conversations about things that matter to us all. Our DEI work helps make those things possible.
  
• We have created training for staff across NPR in facilitating the most difficult conversations across difference, premised on the idea that a staff equipped to work through those conversations will do better work; be better leaders; and produce better, more accurate, authentic and compelling storytelling. We have also made that training available to Member stations. The Fall 2024 program featured 13 NPR staff from nine divisions, along with six colleagues from Member stations.
  
• For nearly four years, Whitney has led anti-racism conversations. called STAR (Start Talking About Race). These twice-monthly discussions provide staff opportunities to discuss the ways race and racism affect how people view, engage and invisibilize those around them. Whitney also leads NPR's ongoing effort to address inequities — historic and current — affecting women of color on staff.
  
• The Office of Diversity oversees 13 Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) whose role is to provide community and connection while fostering awareness, respect, inclusion and to celebrate the diverse backgrounds, perspectives and experiences of our employees. ERGs help to drive the organization's strategic priorities and business outcomes by hosting trainings, providing content and policy feedback and improving employee retention through educational events and initiatives.
  
• We conduct regular Workplace Culture surveys and share those company-wide results with all staff internally. Our People Team performs deeper analyses based on divisions and works with division leaders to develop and implement action plans in response to survey data. Improvements year over year in employee engagement and satisfaction serve as metrics for our progress. The results directly inform the work around transforming our workplace culture. NPR's focus on women of color and our recent emphasis on feedback are direct results of feedback from previous surveys.

People Team Policies and Initiatives

• We conduct regular Unconscious Bias training across the organization (mandatory for all those in supervisory roles) and require anti-harassment training.
• We facilitate DiSC workshops for teams across NPR to develop leaders and teams and foster a more inclusive workplace. The workshops are designed to teach participants how to flex their style to communicate, listen, and provide feedback more effectively and respectfully with others in the workplace who are different from one another. We also designed and launched trainings on how to give and receive effective feedback to encourage open, honest communication and learning from one another across diversity.
• We offer numerous webinars and education sessions to staff on how to support employee well-being.
• We now conduct bi-annual pay equity studies and wage gap analyses. As we did previously, those company-wide results and conclusions have been communicated to staff, and the studies have underscored the importance of our ongoing work to hire, retain, and promote women and people of color.
• We are tracking our progress in diversifying our workforce and leadership teams, and sharing data with our employees on a quarterly basis, including statistics on hiring, representation, and voluntary turnover to reinforce accountability and transparency in this work. This data is available to all staff members via our Intranet site. NPR has published statistics about the representation of staff on three dimensions — race and ethnicity,  gender identity, and abilities.
• We are focusing our job recruitment efforts on building a more diverse workforce: We require that every finalist pool and every hiring committee have racial/ethnic and gender diversity. We have designed and implemented processes in hiring to mitigate bias and discrimination, including structured interviews and requiring hiring panels to complete interview score cards. We have revised our job description template to ensure inclusive language and include salary ranges in our postings. We continue our leadership of the Public Media Village, a collaborative recruiting effort at the NABJ, NAHJ, NAJA, AAJA and NLGJA conventions.
• We created and maintained practices to mitigate bias and discrimination in our promotions processes, with clear criteria (in partnership with our unions for bargaining unit roles) that we communicate to staff before each promotion round. By centralizing the promotion process and communicating the promotion criteria transparently beforehand, we ensure more clarity and fairness in the process. We also track promotion rates across different groups to further mitigate against bias in our promotions.

Content Priorities

• Since 2020, we have welcomed interns as part of a collaboration with the Military Veterans in Journalism organization. 
• We continue to improve on NPR's proprietary source-tracking software called Dex, a platform launched in 2021 that allows journalists across NPR to keep track of the demographics of their sources. NPR has been engaged in source tracking since 2013, but Dex has created a seamless way for journalists to keep track of their own efforts to bring a greater diversity of voices to our audience. NPR's Research, Archives, and Data Strategy (RAD) team and our Audience Insights team continue to provide analyses of the racial/ethnic, gender and geographic diversity of our news sources.
• The Reflect America Fellowship, a year-long program aimed at helping Content teams deepen and diversify coverage while introducing NPR to new, talented journalists, continues.

(Last Updated: November 1, 2024)

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