WNET Group, the parent company of New York’s popular PBS station Thirteen, said on Thursday that its next chief executive would be Edward O’Keefe, a veteran of CNN and ABC News.
Mr. O’Keefe, 48, will start in September. In an interview, he said WNET, which is behind shows like “Nature,” “Amanpour and Company” and “Great Performances,” would experiment in emerging storytelling formats and popular subject areas such as arts, culture and children’s programming.
As a public media organization, “WNET is neither beholden to a challenged broadcast model nor driven by Wall Street’s desire for endless growth,” Mr. O’Keefe said. “WNET is free to focus on what matters: stories and the audiences who want those stories wherever they are.”
Public broadcasting has been upended by Congress’s decision last year to eliminate $500 million in annual federal funding, sending station managers and executives scrambling to drum up new revenue. WNET Group avoided the worst and has maintained its $270 million endowment without incurring any debt. But it laid off some members of its staff last fall to make up for a $12 million budget shortfall.
One of Mr. O’Keefe’s biggest priorities will be figuring out how to retool WNET and Thirteen for an era of fewer traditional TV viewers. Though WNET was created to serve the New York area, digital channels have given the organization “limitless opportunities” to reach viewers around the world and maximize its impact, he said.
“The entire media ecosystem is going through a chaotic upheaval,” Mr. O’Keefe said. “And in that chaos, there’s opportunity.”
Mr. O’Keefe has decades of experience in television, serving as executive producer at the digital arm of ABC News before joining CNN as a vice president in 2014. After leaving that network in 2019, he was an entrepreneurship fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. He joined the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library that year and led fund-raising for a $450 million center in the North Dakota Badlands.
James Attwood, the chairman of the WNET board of trustees, said the organization’s current financial stability did not make it immune from broader challenges facing the media industry. That is one of the reasons the board hired Mr. O’Keefe, who has experience creating digital businesses.
“That doesn’t mean our business model doesn’t have to evolve,” Mr. Attwood said. “Our distribution model is somewhat archaic.”
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