Edith Chapin

As NPR's acting Chief Content Officer, Edith Chapin oversees NPR's journalism and journalists around the world and across platforms. She leads an award-winning team of journalists and newsroom executives who are committed to excellence, innovation and the highest quality reporting and storytelling.

Chapin previously served as NPR's Senior Vice President and Editor in Chief. In 2023, she assumed an additional role as acting Chief Content Officer, charged with leading the strategic unification of NPR's newsroom, podcasting, music and cultural programming operations. She continued in both capacities until Thomas Evans was announced as Editor in Chief in the fall of 2025.

Chapin has a unique skill set as a top editorial leader with experience in philanthropy. She works with the Development team to help form fund-raising strategy in coordination with news, while steering focus and resources around special projects in the newsroom's strategic coverage priorities of disinformation, threats to democracy, climate change, social justice and the presidential administration.

Chapin first joined NPR in 2012 as the senior supervising editor of NPR's International Desk, managing a team of correspondents based outside the United States committed to bringing listeners dynamic stories of the world's people, politics, economy and culture. By 2015, she was named Executive Editor, overseeing all desks and reporters, and helping to set the agenda for the entire News division.

From 2017-2019 she led NPR's efforts to build a Collaborative Journalism Network with NPR Member stations that reports the important stories of the nation, as told by reporters and people who live in and know the communities where those stories unfold. That continuing initiative now includes seven regional newsrooms across the United States and topic team focus areas such as climate reporting, health, education and national politics.

In 2022, while serving as Vice President and Executive Editor for NPR News, she took on an additional assignment in partnership with NPR's Development team, with a focus on fundraising initiatives related to NPR's strategic priorities in news.

Before joining NPR, Chapin spent 25 years at CNN and worked her way up from intern, to bureau chief to vice president. Most recently, Chapin was the Vice President and Deputy Bureau Chief of CNN's Washington, D.C. bureau, where her strategic editorial and management responsibility included oversight of the 2009 presidential transition coverage and daily coverage of the White House and Capitol Hill.

For two years, beginning in August 2005, Chapin was CNN's New York Bureau chief and prior to that was CNN's Midwest Regional Bureau Chief based in Chicago for 18 months.

As CNN's deputy bureau chief and managing editor in New York from 1997-2004, Chapin directed the network's editorial coverage during a crucial time in the city's recent history, which included the 2003 blackout, the new millennium and the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Chapin was the first to alert the network that a plane had hit the World Trade Center on 9/11.

Chapin's journalism career took her to London in 1992 for five years as CNN's field producer and assignment manager where she produced news stories in Europe, the Middle East, Latin America and Africa. She went to Baghdad one month before the first Gulf War and was in the first team of reporters allowed back into the country in the war's aftermath.

During her time overseas, Chapin worked in Syria; Jordan; South Africa, to cover Nelson Mandela's election; reported on the genocide in Rwanda and Bosnia; and the United States' invasion of Panama. Her first field assignment literally got her wet behind the ears: Hurricane Gilbert, a category five hurricane that hit Mexico.

Chapin's work has been recognized with the journalism industry's highest honors including a 2005 George Foster Peabody Award for coverage of Hurricane Katrina, a 2005 Alfred I. DuPont Columbia University Award for CNN's coverage of tsunami disaster in South Asia, and a 1997 Cable ACE award for extended breaking news coverage of Rwanda and Zaire.

Chapin contributed to Covering Catastrophe (Bonus Books, 2002), a book recounting the events of 9/11 in an oral history format. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and former Chair of the Board of Trustees at The Masters School.

She holds a Bachelor of Science in journalism from Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism.