Nearly six years after he took the helm at Vermont Public Radio, the man who oversaw its merger with Vermont PBS plans to step down from the combined public broadcasting entity.
Vermont Public’s board of directors announced Friday that president and chief executive officer Scott Finn will be leaving at the end of the year.
“Vermont Public has never been in a better place, and it’s a good time for them to be finding their new leader,” Finn told VTDigger. He said he wants to take some time to figure out what he’ll do next.
According to Finn, Vermont Public’s television and radio audiences are stable. The news network has a cumulative weekly audience of 157,000 and the classical network 40,000, he said.
Vermont Public has 40,000 members, people who donate to the station in a given year, Finn said. Of those, he added, two-thirds are much-sought-after sustained givers, meaning that they automatically contribute monthly. That allows the network to budget with predictability.
Finn said the network has hired 10 additional people onto its digital staff. The organization has a strategic plan to grow its digital audience by 50% between 2022 and 2025. Finn said the summer floods brought that audience to those levels on some platforms.
“Our website, for example, the traffic is through the roof,” he said, adding that the network’s Instagram and TikTok metrics are already exceeding those hoped for by 2025.
What the network has yet to figure out, according to Finn, is how to turn its digital audiences into sustainable revenue.
“That’s going to be the work of the next leader,” he said.
In a 2021 interview with VTDigger at the time the merger was finalized, Finn said a key goal was to reach new audiences.
“We’re doing really well with that,” he said Friday, adding, “We’ve really focused over the last several years in reaching out to communities that we haven’t always covered as well as we should have.”
Finn cited the network’s airing of Erica Heilman’s podcast Rumble Strip, increasing its coverage of the Northeast Kingdom and other rural parts of Vermont, and producing the Myra Flynn podcast Homegoings. He said the network has increased its hiring of Black, indigenous and people of color over the last six years. He said about 10% of the staff are members of BIPOC communities.
Brendan Kinney, senior vice president of development, will take over as interim CEO while the board of directors searches for a successor, the network said in a press release.
Finn, who moved to Vermont from West Virginia, said he plans to stay in Jericho, where he said his family has been embraced.
“I have a son who has a pretty profound disability,” Finn said. “He’s autistic and doesn’t speak and the way that his school and our community have embraced him has been really touching. So we love Vermont.”
Disclosure: VTDigger has partnered with Vermont Public to share a reporter.
Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated the year of Vermont Public Radio and Vermont PBS’ merger and the size of Vermont Public’s weekly news audience .
