After Chicago Public Media bought the Sun-Times in early 2022 and merged it with National Public Radio affiliate WBEZ, the future looked bright for what had become the largest nonprofit local newsroom in the country. But since then, things have turned stormy. This year has seen layoffs, deep cuts to WBEZ’s vaunted podcast unit, and the discontinuation of the urban alternative station Vocalo. And while the Sun-Times says it has grown its digital audience, WBEZ’s ratings have sunk from No. 2 in the market three years ago to No. 17 today.

Trying to right the ship is Melissa Bell, who took over as CEO in September. The digital media vet, who cofounded the explanatory journalism website Vox and was publisher of New York–based Vox Media until 2023, still sees promise and possibility in public media.

It’s been a difficult year for Chicago Public Media. What’s the state of employee morale?

I can’t speak to what happened before I got here, but I feel like the team feels energized. There’s a sense of pride in the organizations, of hope. It’s a tough market. It’s a tough industry. I don’t think anyone’s blind to that, but it doesn’t feel in any way to me an organization that’s fearful or defensive. It feels open to what the future holds.

Three years in, how well have WBEZ and the Sun-Times been working together?

I watched the teams during the [Democratic National Convention], just to get a feel of how they cover a big event. They complement each other really well. There’s the more audio narrative storytelling with WBEZ, and there’s the very tough, fast-paced news reporting of the Sun-Times. When they come together on a big story like the DNC, you can see from the vibrancy of our reporting, of our deep knowledge of Chicago and Illinois, how this big national story plays in our city. So from a journalism perspective, it’s going fantastically well. But there are questions that we have: How do we better tell our story to our audiences? How do we find new products to build at the intersection of the two? But that’s kind of the fun stuff we get to explore in the years ahead.

Does your background in digital media indicate that direction?

Yes, I think I can help us explore new areas. We have a fantastic photography and video team, and I’d love to help them find more ways to showcase their work. My hope is that I can bring some of my experience with understanding how quickly audiences change and how we need to adjust our journalism for that. There’s already a ton of people in the newsrooms thinking in a forward digital direction, so my work is to support them. I’m not the single answer.

How important are ratings and readership to Chicago Public Media?

If we’re doing great work and it’s not reaching people, that’s a problem. We’re seeing a rise in the U.S. of people who are actively avoiding the news. [The Reuters Institute just did a study in which 39 percent of the population identified as news avoiders. That was up three points from last year.] We need to take a hard look at how are we being a necessary, useful part of people’s lives — one that doesn’t feel overwhelming or exhausting or depressing? You can create a diet in the mix of the news you’re presenting that can help people take some breaks while still getting the critical issues that confront us. It’s important for us to have a more conversational approach with our audience so they feel like they’re interacting with smart friends rather than remote publishers. People feel connected to Mary Dixon because they know her voice so well. We’re also no longer in competition with just news organizations. We’re in competition with YouTube creators and podcast hosts who aren’t journalists. That’s something we can do a lot of work on: helping people understand the value of what we’re doing with our reporting.

The reason cited for the layoffs was a dip in revenue. How do you plan to improve that?

I’ve always believed that great journalism can build great businesses. But we’re also in an industry that is just under constant change. So it’s important to be a careful and considerate business leader. I don’t want to ever get too far ahead of ourselves. I also don’t want to not take risks when they present a good opportunity. It’s important to be aware of how are business is doing and make small adjustments in time.

Chicago Public Media is funded by philanthropic support, underwriting, advertising, and pledge and subscription models. Do you foresee any changes to that mix?

My first job is making sure that all those lines are stable and growing, and investing in the area where you see a bit more potential, pulling back in areas where if, for example, the advertising market is down, maybe we need to make sure we’re pushing harder into membership drives, and always keeping the balance going as the market changes.

How do you see Chicago Public Media positioned in the local media market?

There are a couple reasons why I wanted to come to Chicago specifically, and one is that there is a really innovative spirit in Chicago’s journalism circle. There are great experiments. There’s a sense of pride in trying to help create better news products here. There’s also a very strong civic pride in Chicago residents. Chicago to me feels like a place people stay and try to build this town together. A newspaper and a public radio station can play active roles in helping to understand the nuances of a city as it grows.

What do you see as the future for newspaper and radio news?

You have to have a diversified portfolio of products for a diverse audience. I think about my sister a lot. She’s a fantastic artist and former schoolteacher, and she’s dyslexic. She’s such a brilliant, smart human, and yet she felt she couldn’t access the newspaper in the same way I could until she found her public radio station, and that changed her relationship to news. And so I think about that with everyone. I don’t think there’s any single future product. We need to constantly sustain the things that are working for audiences while exploring new pathways.