Nadine Zylstra is trading her Pinterest vision board to try to get her head around the future of public media.
The seasoned media exec most recently was Pinterest’s global head of programming and original content, and before that worked in top programming jobs at YouTube and Sesame Workshop. Zylstra will join NPR as chief content officer in July 2026, based out of its Culver City, California, offices.
“This the job of a lifetime,” Zylstra told Variety in an interview. She said she loves her job at Pinterest and that “it had to be a super-special opportunity for me to leave.”
“I feel like I’ve been training for this job all my life,” she said. To Zylstra, heading NPR’s content teams presents the opportunity to serve the public with meaningful storytelling: “In terms of having a positive impact on the world — that’s literally what gets me out of bed in the morning.”
Zylstra joins NPR at a critical moment for public media. Last year, Donald Trump’s effort to defund NPR and PBS passed through Congress, with Republicans alleging their programming is “woke” and biased against conservatives. That eliminated hundreds of millions of dollars from their budgets. A federal judge ruled that Trump‘s executive order to end funding for PBS and NPR violated the First Amendment, because it represented “viewpoint discrimination and retaliation.” But for now it’s unlikely the U.S. government will restore funds to the public media orgs.
