Ryan Merkley named COO of National Public Radio and will oversee NPR’s AI strategy

Ryan Merkley has been appointed Chief Operating Officer of D.C.-based National Public Radio (NPR) and will oversee NPR’s AI strategy, reports Inside Radio.

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 Merkley.

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.

“Throughout his career, Merkley 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,” NPR CEO Katherine Maher said in a release.

More here.