Kevin Klose
Advisory Board Member
President and CEO for National Public Radio (NPR)
 
Kevin Klose is President and Chief Executive Officer for National Public Radio, America's premier non-profit news and cultural radio programming service, with more than 730 stations and a weekly audience of nearly 22 million listeners nationwide.

A former editor, and national and foreign correspondent with The Washington Post, Klose is an award-winning author and international broadcasting executive. Prior to joining NPR in December 1998, Klose served successively as Director of U.S. International Broadcasting, overseeing the U.S. Government's global radio and television news services (1997-98); and President of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), broadcasting to Central Europe and the former Soviet Union (1994-97). Klose first joined RFE/RL in 1992 as Director of Radio Liberty, broadcasting to the former Soviet Union in its national languages.

As RFE/RL President, Klose radically downsized RFE/RL and moved it from Munich, Germany, to Prague, the Czech Republic . He also helped devise and implement a strategy to coordinate all U.S.-funded international broadcasting (Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia, Radio/TV Marti, Worldnet Television) to save money, refocus the mission, and modernize operations in the post-Cold War.

Klose is a founder of the Intermedia Survey Institute of Washington, a non-profit research firm specializing in media and opinion survey in Eurasia.

Prior to RFE/RL, Klose was an editor and reporter at The Washington Post for 25 years. His various positions at the newspaper included City Editor (1974-76); Moscow Bureau Chief (1977-1981); Midwest correspondent (1983-1987); and Deputy National Editor (1987-1990).

Klose received a Bachelor of Arts degree, cum laude, at Harvard. A former Woodrow Wilson National Fellow, he serves on the Board of The Eurasia Foundation in Washington. He is the author of Russia and the Russians: Inside the Closed Society, winner of the Overseas Press Club's Cornelius Ryan Award; and co-author of four other books. NPR is renowned for journalistic excellence and standard-setting news and entertainment programming.