It’s been a busy year for St. Louis Public Radio, which is beginning a transition from ownership by the University of Missouri-St. Louis to an independent board of directors, even as it navigates the Trump administration’s plans to claw back federal funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting—money that comprises 6.2 percent of STLPR’s annual budget.
Now it will navigate those challenges under an interim leader.
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In a letter to staff yesterday, CEO Tina Pamintuan announced that her last day will be April 25. Left unsaid in the letter is that Pamintuan, who has been at the station for three and a half years, begins a new job as president and CEO of Seattle public radio station KUOW in August.
Jess Luther, a longtime staffer promoted to chief of staff under Pamintuan, will serve as interim general manager in her stead. Luther says she anticipates that the station’s board of directors will hire Pamintuan’s replacement after the separation from UMSL. The timeline on that is not clear; the station has said the split from UMSL could take up to three years. Board president Andrea Cannon says that, until the transition is complete, the CEO “remains an employee” of UMSL and that questions about hiring plans should be directed to them.
In short: While STLPR has never been known for quick hiring processes, Pamintuan’s replacement might be the most complicated of all.
In her letter to staff, Pamintuan herself described her hiring by STLPR as “one of the most drawn out and intense processes I’ve ever been in.” Indeed, it took a year for the station to find a new leader after general manager Tim Eby was unceremoniously relieved of his duties. That transition took place at a time of deep distrust within the station’s employees, with editorial staffers previously writing an open letter accusing leadership of racism and the station’s then-news director writing an open letter “owning up” to the station’s “racist past.”
Pamintuan suggested to SLM that she saw her role as a change agent who helped instill a new culture.
“Throughout my career, I’ve gone into stations where there was a specific mandate to do a specific kind of work, and I tried to answer that call the best I can,” she says. “I did it in San Francisco and now in St. Louis. I feel like the work has been really deep and intense and transformative, right? That’s the feeling I had about the culture, and just the way that we move around in space as colleagues is different from when I started, and that will poise the station and its staff for success.”
As for Luther, she praised Pamintuan’s mentorship and said that she does not intend to apply for her job on a permanent basis. “My role here is to use my institutional knowledge to use the collaborative relationships that I’ve built, both on staff and among the board, to support our staff and our operation during the transitionary time,” she says.
The general manager is not the only role in transition. The hire of a new development director, David Hutchison, was announced internally just last week. The station also continues to seek a managing editor for news, a reconfigured version of the news director job, almost two years after Pamintuan let the previous one go. (An attempted replacement, Ashley Lisenby, lasted just five months.) Luther says that hiring process will continue before a new CEO is brought on.
The separation from UMSL remains by far the biggest hurdle ahead. While Pamintuan came to St. Louis talking about the need to separate from the university system, she’s leaving just as the idea is becoming a potentially messy reality—a time when the station’s board will have to negotiate everything from the value of its Grand Center headquarters (which is currently owned by UMSL) to the establishment of a health insurance plan (staffers currently partake in UMSL’s generous benefits package). And that’s even as many in Missouri state government are hostile to the media.
Sources say it was the University of Missouri that initiated the split, not STLPR. But Pamintuan says she welcomed the separation. “It couldn’t have come soon enough for me,” she says.
She adds, “I knew that that type of independence was going to be really important for the future, for the sustainability, for the growth of the station, not just in the years that I would be there, and not even just five years, but the next 50 years.”
(Asked for comment on the split, UMSL spokesman Stephen Walentik says, “The collaborative efforts between UMSL and STLPR to move the station to independence allows it to chart its own course while staying true to its mission of providing high-quality journalism and community service. We believe this transition will empower the station to remain a vital resource of unbiased news for our region.”)
Pamintuan says she believes STLPR is ready to weather both the situation in Washington and the one in Jefferson City, noting the pledge drive that finished last week exceeded the station’s goals.
She says she will miss St. Louis—citing both the Children’s Garden at the Missouri Botanical Garden and the people she’s gotten to know here. Her son, she notes, was born here.
“If I left my heart in San Francisco, as the song goes, and if I am going to leave a piece of me here, then I’ve left a piece of my soul in St. Louis. But, you know, I got to take something with me to Seattle.”
Full disclosure: Sarah Fenske was an STLPR employee from 2019-2022 and continues to take one shift a month as the host of its Legal Roundtable.
