Vermont Public hires Vijay Singh as new CEO

Vijay Singh, a longtime public media professional, will be the next chief executive officer at Vermont Public, the organization announced Friday.

On Oct. 1, he’ll take over from Brendan Kinney, who became the interim CEO in October 2023 after Scott Finn stepped down . Finn led the organization 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 organization’s board settled on Singh as its next leader.

“I’ve been a fan from afar for a while,” Singh said Friday. “I think public media is so powerful, and Vermont Public is one of the best examples of the impact that public media can have with its storytelling. …  I’m so excited to be joining.”

He most recently served as the chief operating and content officer at CapRadio, a National Public Radio affiliate in the Sacramento, California, area. As Vermont Public reported , his tenure there coincided with a period of instability at the organization, including a 12% cut to staff last August. An audit looking at the period from July 2020 through June 2023 found significant misuse of money and conflict of interest concerns at the organization.

“It was an extremely tumultuous time,” Singh said. “I think people were, staff were very understandably afraid and confused, and my role was to help navigate the organization through that time.”

Singh started at CapRadio in September 2022 as director of product and strategy and said he left the organization in January. He worked to expand the affiliate’s digital audience and is proud of a new product launched — the SacramenKnow newsletter.

“I didn’t take it as far as I would like, but I think I started to build systems and an understanding within the people who worked there that they had a voice in the process, that they had agency,” he said.

Christopher Bruno, chief marketing and revenue officer at CapRadio, said in a statement that Singh brought an audience-first approach, was “a source of stability” during the financial crisis and “played an instrumental role in our digital transformation efforts.”

Singh was previously head 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 held several senior positions in the private sector, including Carfax, UBM Canon and Hybrid Vigor, LLC, where he was the principal.

In addition to Singh’s experience in technology, product management and his understanding of user needs, board member Kerri Hoffman said Singh has acted as a strategic thinker and a problem solver in every job he’s had.

“When you are known as someone who is inquisitive and doesn’t shy away from gnarly problems, that’s a real impressive thing for me,” she said.

“I think Vermont Public is excellent at finding the humanity in stories and really getting to know the people. So it’s not just covering topics, it’s understanding the humans behind the stories,” Singh told VTDigger.

In addition to maintaining the quality of programming Vermont Public offers, Singh said, “We really have to capture the next generation audience, a different audience than we have today, because we know there are gaps in our service.”

“If we can really truly serve the folks who we’re not serving now, then I’ll look back and I’ll be very proud of the work that I and the team did,” he added.

Currently in upstate New York, Singh, 39, is planning to move to Vermont with his wife, Amanda, an interior designer for a New York architecture firm, and their two terriers, Noodle and Nellie.

The incoming CEO said he’s looking forward to being part of a community where neighbors know each other.

No stranger to the Northeast, Singh was born in Pennsylvania and lived in Bloomingburg, a small town in upstate New York. The combination of growing up in a rural, low-income area and being raised in a household by immigrant parents from Guyana, Singh said, greatly influenced his career and the kind of storytelling he likes and wants to see in the media.

“Public media is for everyone. We have to serve our entire audience, all of our communities, but I think we are responsible for serving especially historically marginalized communities,” he said. “So my experience growing up that way absolutely has an influence on that.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: Vermont Public hires Vijay Singh as new CEO .