Chris Satullo Out at WHYY

Was credited with building the NPR affiliate's news operations.

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Chris Satullo, WHYY’s vice president of news and civic dialogue since 2008, is leaving the station. His last day of employment will be September 11th, but he’ll no longer be present at WHYY facilities following the close of business Friday.

He did not immediately return an email for comment. Art Ellis, a spokesman for the NPR affiliate, said only: “We can confirm he’s leaving, but I can’t get into why he’s leaving.”

But his departure apparently came suddenly and with little warning: Satullo had, in recent weeks, been contacting reporters outside the organization to gauge their interest in new products, and reportedly spent this week in a retreat, helping strategize how to take one of WHYY’s local programs to a national audience — indications he planned to stay in his role awhile.

He met with stunned WHYY staffers off-campus, at Franklin Square, early Thursday afternoon.

Satullo told those staffers he was legally required not to comment on the reasons for leaving. “Please trust me when I say I simply cannot answer many of your questions right now,” he said, later adding: “No I do not know what I’m going to do next.”

He was applauded by staffers at the end of a short speech in which he exhorted them to keep doing their best work.

“Chris was a great leader for the WHYY newsroom and the web team,” said a former reporter who asked not to be identified. “He pushed reporters to get the story, he juggled more meetings and commitments than anyone else and yet when he sat down with a reporter to discuss a story, he gave his full attention. He breathed life into that newsroom and his presence will be sorely missed.”

Before coming to WHYY, Satullo was a longtime columnist and editorial page editor for the Philadelphia Inquirer. He came to the radio station knowing that he wouldn’t have nearly the resources the paper, in those pre-bankruptcy times, had. His strategy: Create partnerships with other news organization to maximize WHYY’s breadth and depth of reporting.

That’s how the station joined forces with The Notebook, the schools-centric reporting outlet, and how PlanPhilly — formerly a project at PennPraxis — came to fall under the WHYY label earlier this year. Other projects, like Keystone Crossroads and StateImpact Pennsylvania, were grant-funded partnerships with other public radio stations across the state. StateImpact in 2013 won a Alfred I. duPont–Columbia University Award, the broadcasting equivalent of a Pulitzer.

Satullo also did weekly commentaries for the radio and WHYY’s website.

There had been rumors over time that he had struggled with WHYY’s president and CEO, Bill Marrazzo, over the resources allocated to reporting. Ellis on Thursday said there are no plans for cutbacks at the station.

“As an organization, we’ve been comitted to growing our resources, adding reporters,” Ellis said, “and to the extent we can, we’re going to continue to do so.”

The full memorandum describing Satullo’s departure is below: