Minnesota Public Radio’s Bill Kling, founder and CEO, to step down in June 2011

Minnesota Public Radio CEO, founder to step down

MINNEAPOLIS — Bill Kling started Minnesota Public Radio with just one station in a college town more than 40 years ago and built a broadcasting empire that stretches into southern California and South Florida. Now, MPR’s parent company will look for a new leader after Kling, its founder and only CEO since 1966, announced Friday that he plans to step down next year.

Kling, 68, said he will leave his position with American Public Media Group next June. He intends to develop fundraising initiatives outside of the St. Paul-based company aimed at strengthening public media and showing how it can gather and distribute regional news like MPR has done.

“I think we’ve done well in the last 40 years,” Kling told The Associated Press. “I need to go off and see if I can convince some people that we can take it to a higher level.”

MPR’s network of 40 radio stations — with a newsroom staff of 80 and 111,000 listeners — is among the largest in the U.S., and American Public Media, another arm of MPR’s parent, provides such popular programs as “A Prairie Home Companion” and “Marketplace.” American Public Media Group also is the parent of Southern California Public Radio in Los Angeles and Classical South Florida in Miami.

Kling said the company, whose programming is heard by more than 16 million listeners on nearly 800 radio stations nationwide each week, is “really at a peak — not at its peak, or the peak — but it definitely is at a peak. And it’s in good shape.”

“So it’s an exciting time and it’s a great time for somebody with the energy to take all of that opportunity and move it to the peak,” Kling said.

Even before National Public Radio existed, Kling started MPR in 1967 as a single radio station at St. John’s University in Collegeville, in central Minnesota. He’s been president and CEO ever since and was a founding board member of NPR three years later.

Garrison Keillor, creator and host of “A Prairie Home Companion,” joked that he’ll have to have another job interview now that Kling is leaving.

Kling hired Keillor after the then-27-year-old humorist went to Kling’s Collegeville office for a job interview in 1969, “and that was the last job interview I had,” recalled Keillor, now 68.

In 1980, when NPR was reluctant to distribute “A Prairie Home Companion” nationally, Kling created a company to distribute the folksy music variety show outside the region. Kling also set up lucrative, for-profit catalog companies — later sold to what is now Target Corp. — to sell Powdermilk Biscuits T-shirts and other memorabilia from the show.

“He was an old-time entrepreneur at a time when public radio or educational radio … was really dominated by sleepy academics,” Keillor said of Kling.

With his businessman’s spirit in a world of noncommercial radio, Kling has always been “a lightning rod,” said news media analyst Ken Doctor, a former managing editor of the St. Paul Pioneer Press.

“He’s not going to be elected in a popular vote, but he is a visionary and he sees the potential of a lot more journalism being created locally and then being shared and connected up nationally,” Doctor said.

An executive search firm has been retained to identify both internal and external candidates to succeed Kling.

Online:

www.minnesotapublicradio.org

www.americanpublicmedia.org