Terence Samuel, a top news executive at National Public Radio, will be the next editor in chief of USA Today.
Gannett, the nation’s largest newspaper chain and the publisher of USA Today, made the announcement on Friday. Mr. Samuel, who will start on July 10, fills a position vacated in May by Nicole Carroll, who had led USA Today for five years.
Mr. Samuel, 61, is a vice president and executive editor at NPR, where he oversees all news gathering at the network. Before joining NPR in 2017, he was a deputy national political editor at The Washington Post, and he has also worked at The Root, The Philadelphia Inquirer and U.S. News & World Report.
Mr. Samuel said in a statement that he was honored to help lead USA Today, which made its debut in 1982, “into a digital future.”
“USA Today has a distinctive and groundbreaking history in American journalism and is uniquely positioned to inform the conversations and tell the stories that impact American life,” he said.
Kristin Roberts, Gannett’s chief content officer, said Mr. Samuel would “accelerate our transformation of USA Today, embracing our role and our roots as America’s newspaper with the core mission of being nothing less than essential to the readers, viewers and listeners we serve nationwide.”
In an email to NPR staff on Friday, Edith Chapin, the interim senior vice president for news, said the network would conduct a national search to find his replacement.
Mr. Samuel joins Gannett at a perilous time. The company, struggling under a debt burden from its 2019 merger with GateHouse Media, has had multiple rounds of layoffs in recent years. Its stock price has plummeted nearly 70 percent since the merger.
Hundreds of journalists from about two dozen Gannett newsrooms plan to walk off the job on Monday during the company’s annual shareholder meeting in protest over its executive leadership.
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