NPR Board Welcomes Newly Elected Directors

RADIO ONLINE | Friday, September 17, 2021

NPR welcomes the election of A. Rima Dael from WSHU in Fairfield, CT (first term); Jennifer Ferro an incumbent from KCRW in Santa Monica, CA (second term); Maria O'Mara an incumbent from KUER in Salt Lake City, UT (first term); and Tina Pamintuan an incumbent from KALW in San Francisco, CA (first term), who were elected as Member Directors of the NPR Board of Directors in the 2021 NPR Board elections, with three-year terms beginning in November 2021. Maria O'Mara and Tina Pamintuan were previously filling unexpired term vacancies and have now been elected to initial three-year terms.

NPR also is pleased to report that the Membership confirmed the Board's election of Carlos Watson and Neal Zuckerman to their second three-year terms as Public Directors beginning in November 2021.

On a separate ballot, PRSS representatives ratified the Board's election of Patricia Deal Cahill to a three-year term as a Non-Board Distribution/Interconnection Committee member beginning in November 2021.

NPR's 23-member Board of Directors is comprised of 12 Member Directors who are managers of NPR Member stations and are elected to the Board by their fellow Member stations, 9 Public Directors who are prominent members of the public selected by the Board and confirmed by NPR Member stations, the NPR Foundation Chair, and the NPR President & CEO.

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A. Rima Dael is General Manager of WSHU, Fairfield, Connecticut. She has over 25 years of experience working with nonprofit organizations in Public Media, Arts, Education & the Human Service sectors. She came to WSHU from New England Public Radio, where she was the executive director of development & major gifts. Dael is passionate about the essential role of public media in our communities and the transformational power of the arts.

Originally from the Philippines, Dael spent her early years in Old Greenwich, CT, and in several Southeast Asian countries. Rima received her bachelor's degree in Anthropology and Theatre Arts from Mt. Holyoke College. Her master's degree is in Nonprofit Management from the Milano School of Management & Urban Policy at the New School University where she was a Community Development Finance Fellow.

Jennifer Ferro is president of KCRW, where she has worked to transform the institution from Southern California's flagship public radio station to a worldwide community that connects through the discovery of music, news and culture, both in person, online and on the air.

Under her leadership, KCRW completed a $50 million capital campaign and moved into its first-ever, stand-alone, state-of-the-art facility in early 2019. KCRW's presence includes podcasts, original content features, live events, streams, a vibrant social networking community and successful mobile app.

Ferro joined KCRW in 1994 and has been involved in many areas from production to development. Prior to that, in college, she spent years as a KCRW volunteer.

Currently Ferro is the co-founder of the Major Action Coalition, a group of public media organizations working to enhance the public radio system in a time of major transformation. She is a board member of the Los Angeles chapter of the International Women's Forum and also a creator of LA's Women in Culture roundtable that brings together the leaders of LA's major cultural institutions.

Ferro also serves as a Senior Fellow for the Luskin School of Public Policy at UCLA where she is an active mentor to graduate and undergraduate students. In 2018, Ferro was awarded the UCLA Award for public service.

Ferro earned her Bachelor's degree from UCLA in Psychology and Political Science. An active soccer player, she spent years as a youth soccer coach and is co-founder of the Women's Coach Initiative to get more women youth soccer coaches on the field.

Maria O'Mara is executive director of KUER where she oversees both KUER, Utah's statewide public radio station broadcasting from Salt Lake City, and PBS Utah, also licensed by the University of Utah, as the stations' executive director. Three years ago, she returned to lead the public radio station where she started her career as a reporter in the 1990s.

Under O'Mara's leadership, KUER has experienced growth in listenership and fundraising, increased the size of its newsroom, opened news bureaus in southern Utah and embarked on an ambitious expansion of its terrestrial and digital footprints. O'Mara's return to KUER in 2017 followed two decades in reporting and news management roles at the Salt Lake Observer, Deseret News and NBC affiliate KSL-TV. The Utah native and U of U alum also worked in external communications positions with the University of Utah and Rocky Mountain Power.

Tina Pamintuan is General Manager of KALW. She has spent over 20 years in public media as a journalist, educator, and leader. As the General Manager of KALW in San Francisco, she helms the station's fundraising, operations, programming, and editorial teams. This multifaceted role also includes being the liaison for the station's FCC license holder, the San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD), and the newly established 501c3, KALW Public Media. Pamintuan will remain at KAWL until the end of November 2022, when she will move to become CEO of St. Louis Public Radio. She is also a Sulzberger fellow at the University of Columbia.

Before moving to the San Francisco Bay Area, Pamintuan made her home in cities along the east coast. In New York, she created and directed the audio journalism program at The Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY where she taught radio writing and reporting, news magazine production, audio documentary and oral history. She now enjoys hearing former students on-air reporting from stations across the country, launching their own investigative series and podcasts and producing and hosting for nationally syndicated programs.

In 2011, Pamintuan traveled to the Philippines on an International Center for Journalists' fellowship to report on climate change and biofuel use in rural areas. In 2012, she produced an audio documentary on Occupy Wall Street hosted by

is a former Nieman Visiting Fellow and Scholar-in-Residence at the Tow Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism. In 2015, she organized a seminar on Native American media and community radio for the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study at Harvard. She was honored to receive the Philippine American Press Club's 2019 Ocampo-Henry Memorial Award in Radio, but even more delighted when her mother, who always wanted to become a journalist, accepted the award on her behalf.

Pamintuan began her career at National Public Radio after graduating from Georgetown University. She lives in Berkeley, California, with her husband Gijs and has recently discovered the joys of her local community garden and food security project.

Carlos Watson was born to teachers in Miami, and has an insatiable appetite for learning that's led him to an Emmy-winning journalism career and to found two companies - including OZY. Things didn't always look so promising: Young Carlos was so rebellious that he was kicked out of kindergarten. But he went on to find his academic stride, earning degrees from Harvard and Stanford Law School.

Now he's a journalist and television host who's earned praise for his ability to persuade high-profile guests to open up about a wide range of topics on camera - interviewing everyone from presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush to Jameela Jamil, Heidi Klum and Bill Gates.

In 2013, Watson flexed his entrepreneurial side and co-founded OZY Media, a daily digital magazine that uncovers the people and trends that are just percolating today but set to go big tomorrow - revealing what you need to know before other news outlets take notice. OZY has since grown into a diversified media company producing chart-topping podcasts, massive festivals and compelling television shows. That includes The Carlos Watson Show, which launched in the summer of 2020 in the midst of the Black Lives Matter protests as a flavorful talk show built to meet this historic moment. Each day, Watson goes deep with a new guest from the worlds of politics, business, entertainment and more to explore the issues of the day and get inside the lives of people you thought you knew.

Watson's curiosity was kindled at an early age in Miami by a mother who had lived and taught on three continents and a father whose love of news, especially politics and sports, was highly contagious. Despite this love of learning,

Watson had problems at school, leading his teachers to label him disruptive and learning disabled, resulting in his aforementioned eviction from kindergarten. "My mom always jokes," he says, "that anyone who'd seen my first 10 years wouldn't believe my last 10 years." But even with the troubles at school, the occasional need for food stamps and a car accident at age 11 that almost rendered him unable to walk, Watson persevered and is hell-bent on sharing his thirst for knowledge with the world.

After college, Watson worked at McKinsey & Company before founding an education company at age 29 called Achieva College Prep Services, which he later sold to The Washington Post Co. A television news career followed, with stints as a political commentator and host at CNN and MSNBC. But disillusioned with seeing the same five headlines regurgitated across every major news outlet each day, he decided to strike out on his own with OZY.

OZY is in many ways his curated party, but like all good hosts, Watson is merely a catalyst for the spirited and wide-ranging conversations among his guests, people who burn to learn more about the world and to do something with that insight.

Neal Zuckerman is a Senior Partner and Managing Director in the New York office of the Boston Consulting Group. He is also the head of the firm's Media Practice globally. In his individual practice, Zuckerman has worked extensively in the media, entertainment, and communications industries across newspapers, magazines, television, radio, digital pure-plays, and b2b media, with particular depth in driving transformation of traditional media companies into sustainable, digitally-focused businesses. This work brings him in partnership with the CEOs, boards of directors, and senior executives of many of the media companies affected by and leading changes to our industry.

He is deeply engaged in developing the firm's intellectual capital on the media industry. Zuckerman has co-authored a number of perspectives dealing with timely issues: "The New News on Print Media Transformation"; "Branded Content: Not your Father's Advertorial"; "The Programmatic Path to Profit for Publishers"; "Beauty Books: Meeting More Demanding Print Advertisers' Needs"; "Follow the Surplus: How U.S. Consumers Value Online Media"; "Transformation in Print Media"; and "The CMO's Dilemma".

Zuckerman has also worked in a variety of not-for-profit media environments as pro and "low" bono investments by the firm, to include support for National Public Radio, the Columbia Journalism School, the Time's Up movement, the National Geographic Society, and Charity Navigator.

Prior to joining BCG in 2006, Zuckerman worked for Time Warner, as head of strategy for Time Inc.'s corporate sales group and as an Executive Director in Time Warner's Strategic Planning group. In the latter role, he engaged in business development for a variety of units across the company, including film production, mobile content, and ad sales departments. Prior to Time Warner, Zuckerman was a senior associate at McKinsey & Co, working predominantly for legacy media companies. Zuckerman holds a BS in European History from the United States Military Academy and an MBA from Harvard Business School. After graduating from West Point, Zuckerman served for six years on active duty as a helicopter pilot, executive officer and company commander in South Korea and Fort Carson, Colorado.

As a proud New Yorker, Zuckerman is involved in civic causes in the New York area. He is on the board of New York State's Metropolitan Transportation Authority (a $17B public authority) as a representative of Putnam County, serving on the MTA's Audit, Finance, Corporate Governance, Metro-North, Long Island Railroad, and Capital Program Committees. He is also a member of the board of the Columbia Journalism Review, a trustee of the Desmond-Fish Library and a member of the Town of Philipstown's Planning Board.

Public Radio has played a special role in Zuckerman's professional and personal life. He was first introduced to public radio in 1992 when stationed at Fort Rucker, Alabama, in the pre-Internet era. WTSU, Troy State Public Radio, was his source of news when living in a remote portion of Alabama during flight school. He then served as a DJ at KRCC, Colorado Springs, hosting a Tuesday late night "freeform" music show. When he returned to New York, he served on WNYC's Community Advisory Board from 2000-2006, with the final two years as its chair. And he has worked with NPR since 2012 as a consultant and advisor on strategic, financial and governance topics in support of 3 board retreats (2012, 2015, 2018). He is a loyal listener to WNYC and WFUV in New York and KRCC in Colorado Springs.

Patricia Deal Cahill has been a leader in the growth and evolution of public media for five decades. Most recently, she was a member of the CPB Board of Directors from 2009 to 2020. She served as the Board's chair from 2012 to 2014, and was elected vice chair in 2011 and 2018.

Cahill served on the NPR Board of Directors from 1982 to 1988, and was chair of the Board's Distribution/Interconnection, Membership and Development Committees. She was also president of Public Radio in Mid America, and vice president of the Kansas Public Radio Association.

Cahill started her professional broadcast career as a reporter and producer at KCUR-FM at the University of Missouri-Kansas in 1973. Three years later, she joined Wichita State University's KMUW-FM where she was a reporter, producer, news director, program director and general manager. In 1987, Cahill returned to KCUR where she served as the station's general manager for 25 years.

Cahill attended the University of Kansas where she earned a B.A. and M.A.