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Even perhaps worse, Ms. Cooper remarked early on that she’d by no means heard of Brian Lehrer, the beloved WNYC morning host whose gently probing, public-spirited interviews embody the station’s attraction, and that she didn’t “get” why he was common. She has since come to the view that “Brian is the soul of the station and, in some ways, the town itself,” a WNYC spokeswoman, Jennifer Houlihan Roussel, stated in an electronic mail.
In reality, Ms. Cooper’s mission was to jump-start the station’s lagging digital transformation, one thing she had executed with uncommon success in San Francisco and that requires a willingness to make enemies. She has formidable plans to rent 15 to twenty extra reporters — however first she had the near-impossible task of bringing collectively a bunch of conventional radio journalists, used to working for days and infrequently weeks on colourful native options, with the reporters at Gothamist, the scrappy native weblog that WNYC bailed out in 2018. Ms. Cooper sought to professionalize Gothamist away from its bloggy and irreverent roots, telling reporters to be much less brazenly hostile to the New York Police Division of their reporting, two reporters stated. Ms. Roussel urged that Ms. Cooper was making an attempt to rein in Gothamist’s tendency behavior of including “a component of editorializing to its protection that may be interpreted as bias.”
And Ms. Cooper began pushing the radio journalists to select up their tempo and to file tales for the net. That appeared like an inexpensive request, however it led to a different stumble in early February, when an 18-year veteran of the radio facet, Fred Mogul, filed a narrative with one paragraph printed in a distinct font. The editor realized it was Related Press copy; Ms. Cooper promptly fired Mr. Mogul (who declined by means of his union to be interviewed) for plagiarism with out a evaluation of whether or not he’d ever executed it earlier than.
Ms. Cooper declined to talk to me about Mr. Mogul’s termination. However one factor I realized this week about public radio is that it doesn’t matter what is occurring, somebody is all the time recording it. And that was true when Ms. Cooper known as a digital assembly Feb. 5 over Zoom to tell the complete newsroom of her resolution to fireside Mr. Mogul. In line with a replica of the recording offered to me by an attendee, Ms. Cooper advised the staffers, “It’s completely OK to be unhappy.” However then a number of shocked radio reporters questioned the transfer, explaining that they often included A.P. copy into tales on air and had imported the apply to WNYC’s little-read web site, crediting The A.P. on the backside of the story.
“Go by means of each single considered one of our articles and fireplace all of us, as a result of that’s precisely what we’ve got all executed,” one host, Rebecca Ibarra, advised her.
On Feb. 10, greater than 60 workers — together with Mr. Lehrer — signed a letter asking Ms. Cooper to rethink and calling the firing a “troubling precedent.”
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