Vijay Singh, a longtime public media professional, will be the next CEO of Vermont Public, the organization announced Friday.
On October 1, he will succeed Brendan Kinney, who became interim CEO in October 2023 following the resignation of Scott Finn. Finn led the company for six years, during which time he oversaw the merger of Vermont Public Radio with Vermont PBS.
After a 10-month nationwide search, the public media company’s board chose Singh as its next leader.
“I’ve been a fan from afar for some time,” Singh said Friday. “I think public media is so powerful, and Vermont Public is one of the best examples of the impact public media can have with its storytelling. … I’m so excited to be involved.”
He most recently served as chief operating and content officer at CapRadio, a National Public Radio affiliate station in the Sacramento, California, area. As Vermont Public reported, his tenure there coincided with a period of instability at the organization, which included a 12% staff cut last August. An audit examining the period from July 2020 to June 2023 found significant waste of money and concerns about conflicts of interest at the organization.
“It was an extremely turbulent time,” Singh said. “I think people, the staff were understandably scared and confused, and my role was to steer the organization through that time.”
Singh started at CapRadio in September 2022 as director of product and strategy and said he left the company in January. He worked to expand the partner’s digital audience and is proud of a new product – the SacramenKnow newsletter.
“I didn’t get as far as I wanted, but I think I started to build systems and create an understanding among the people who worked there that they had a voice in this process, that they had agency,” he said.
Christopher Bruno, CapRadio’s chief marketing and revenue officer, said in a statement that Singh has taken an audience-focused approach, has been “a source of stability” during the financial crisis and has “played a critical role in our digital transformation efforts.”
Singh was previously director of product at KPCC, the NPR member station in Los Angeles. A graduate of Ithaca College, Singh began his career as a documentary filmmaker and has held several senior positions in the private sector, including Carfax, UBM Canon and Hybrid Vigor, LLC, where he was its director.
Board member Kerri Hoffman said that in each of Singh’s jobs, he has not only leveraged Singh’s experience in technology and product management and his understanding of user needs, but also acted as a strategic thinker and problem solver.
“When you’re known as someone who’s curious and doesn’t shy away from difficult problems, I find that really impressive,” she said.
“I think Vermont Public does a great job of finding the human element in stories and really getting to know people. So it’s not just about covering topics, but understanding the people behind the stories,” Singh told VTDigger.
Singh said that in addition to maintaining Vermont Public’s programming quality, it is also about “reaching the next generation of viewers, a different audience than the one we have today, because we know there are gaps in our service.”
“If we can truly provide a real service to the people we are not serving today, then I will look back and be very proud of the work that I and the team have done,” he added.
Singh, 39, currently lives in upstate New York and plans to move to Vermont with his wife Amanda, an interior designer for a New York architectural firm, and their two terriers, Noodle and Nellie.
The new CEO said he looks forward to being part of a community where neighbors know each other.
Singh is no stranger to the Northeast. He was born in Pennsylvania and lived in Bloomingburg, a small town in upstate New York. The combination of his childhood in a rural, low-income area and his upbringing in a household with immigrant parents from Guyana, Singh said, has greatly influenced his career and the type of storytelling he enjoys and wants to see in the media.
“Public media is for everyone. We have to serve all of our audiences, all of our communities, but I think we have a responsibility to serve historically marginalized communities in particular,” he said. “My experience growing up that way definitely influenced that.”
