Navigating complexity and digital transformation in media: An interview with Jamie Fly, president and CEO of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
In this episode of the Heidrick & Struggles Leadership Podcast, Heidrick & Struggles’ Lukasz Kiniewicz and Aliceson Robinson speak to Jamie Fly, the president and CEO of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty's mission is to promote democratic values and institutions and to advance human rights by reporting news in countries where free press is banned or not fully established. Fly discusses the benefits and complexities of being a non-profit, highly purpose-driven organization, his evolution as a leader, and how he is navigating the current uncertainties—from crises such as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to the rapidly evolving digital media landscape.
Some key questions answered in this podcast include:
- (4:09) What was your path to Radio Free Europe and what were the most important professional accomplishments that led you there to the CEO role?
- (6:49) Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty is a hugely purpose-driven organization. To what extent has that mission shaped your leadership approach, noting that your tenure has included the Covid-19 pandemic, the war in Ukraine, and many other geopolitical changes?
- (10:22) What leadership capabilities have you carried from earlier in your career to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, and how have you evolved as a leader during your time there?
- (15:57) What are the key challenges that leading such a complex organization creates?
- (20:25) Looking into the future, what skill sets and capabilities will Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty's next generation of leaders need to keep the audience engaged, and how is the organization seeking and developing those leaders?
Below is a full transcript of the episode, which has been edited for clarity.
Welcome to the Heidrick & Struggles Leadership Podcast. Heidrick is the premier global provider of senior-level executive search and leadership consulting services. Diversity and inclusion, leading through tumultuous times, and building thriving teams and organizations are among the core issues we talk with leaders about every day, including in our podcasts. Thank you for joining the conversation.
Lukasz Kiniewicz: Hi, I am Lukasz Kiniewicz, partner in charge of Heidrick & Struggles’ Warsaw office and a member of the global Technology & Services Practice. I'm also joined by my colleague, Aliceson Robinson, who is a partner in Heidrick & Struggles’ London office and who leads our work in media and consumer tech globally.
In today's podcast, we are excited to speak to Jamie Fly, president and CEO of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty's mission is to promote democratic values and institutions and to advance human rights by reporting news in countries where free press is banned or not fully established. Prior to Jamie's appointment as a CEO, he served as a senior fellow and co-director of the Alliance for Security Democracy and as director of the future of geopolitics and Asia programs at the German Marshall Fund of the United States.
Jamie, welcome and thank you for taking the time to speak with us today.
Jamie Fly: Great to be with you, Lukasz.
Lukasz Kiniewicz: So, the first question. Many people, especially the ones living in Eastern Europe or post–Soviet Bloc countries, remember Radio Free Europe from the Cold War times. What purpose does the organization serve now?
Jamie Fly: Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty really serves a very similar purpose to our mission during the Cold War. We are providing unbiased reporting, truthful information to audiences across our entire coverage region. The coverage region is slightly different than it was decades ago; we now serve 23 countries in 27 languages across Europe and Asia. And what we try to do (ideally) is provide local reporting, information that affects peoples’ day-to-day lives that they're not getting from other sources. So we are operating primarily in countries where there is no freedom of the press, where people are getting bombarded by propaganda, often from government-sponsored media or from foreign actors who are trying to advance a particular political agenda or from local political figures who are trying to manipulate the information and media landscape to serve their narrow corporate or political purposes. And so, we are in these markets as a neutral, independent media organization that provides people with information that they know that they can trust and believe.
The main difference from our work decades ago is really in how we do that. When we were doing primarily radio broadcasts from our headquarters, which was, at that point, in Munich, Germany, we were often known as the voices from afar. We were the voices that people would listen to at night, their favorite radio programs that they would tune in to, often through the jamming that was conducted by governments at the time. And we weren't even able to actually report from the ground in most of the countries we operated. In recent decades, thankfully, we've been able to set up bureaus in many of the countries in which we do our work. We now have about 20 offices across Europe and Asia, we can be there in many of our countries side by side with our audiences. So, now, we don't have to be the voices from afar; we can have a better sense of what our audiences care about and what they want to hear about. [Another difference is], obviously, the transmission means have been modernized and changed. More and more people in most of our countries are now engaging with our content online through social media, through digital content, rather than the traditional radio broadcasts that made us so popular in our early decades.
Aliceson Robinson: We’d love to get to know you a bit better. What was your path to Radio Free Europe and what were the most important professional accomplishments that led you there to the CEO role?
Jamie Fly: So, I should say up front that I'm not a journalist; I don't come out of the news industry. We’ve had a mix of different types of individuals who have been my predecessors here at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. We've had some lifelong journalists who have served in this role, as president of the organization, but we've also had people similar to my background, which is US policy, government, think thanks, and research. I worked in a variety of different places inside the US government in different roles: I worked in the United States’ Congress for several years, and then I worked at a number of think tanks, working on a variety of issues. But most recently, what ultimately led me here, I was doing a lot of work looking at the way Russia in particular uses information to advance its interests both at home and in other countries, and especially looking at the problem of so-called disinformation and malignant Russian interference in democracies and in countries in which it wants to sway public opinion. It was really that research and just the challenges that media, independent media are facing in Eurasia that led me to be interested in joining Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. I'd visited the headquarters here in Prague a number of times over many years, and I had met journalists both here in Prague and out in some of our bureaus. I had always been incredibly impressed by the workforce and by the courage of our journalists, people who often take great risks to report truthful information to their audiences. I was always inspired by the mission. So when the opportunity came along to run the organization, I jumped at it, because I wanted to contribute to that broader fight that is underway to really preserve the truth and to help counter this horrible problem we have globally—not just in the coverage region of Radio Free Europe (RFE), but in the global decline of truthful reporting, the decline of truthful information sources in this digital age. I wanted to be on the front lines of that fight. And RFE is certainly an organization that's right in the middle of that day-to-day battle.
Lukasz Kiniewicz: Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty is a hugely purpose-driven organization. To what extent has that mission shaped your leadership approach, noting that your tenure has included the Covid-19 pandemic, the war in Ukraine, and many other geopolitical changes?
Jamie Fly: That's a unique aspect of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. We’re a private organization, a non-profit under the kind of US structure, and that means that we're not out there looking to make money in each of these markets that we are operating in. Our workforce also doesn't usually come here for the pay. You know, I wish we could be more competitive in many of our markets and also at our headquarters here in Prague, but people often make sacrifices to come work for us. And if you talk to our staff, the main reason that they are willing to work long hours, some of them to leave their home countries, to leave family and friends behind to come work here, is because they deeply believe and are committed to our mission of independent reporting and sharing truthful information with their fellow countrymen and countrywomen back home. Even beyond just the financial challenges or having to move to work for us, our journalists often give up everything. We have three of our journalists right now who are actually serving prison sentences: two in Belarus, one in Russian-occupied Crimea. We've lost multiple journalists in various attacks over the last several years in places like Afghanistan. More recently, in April of last year, shortly after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine began, one of our producers, Vera Gyrych, was killed tragically in a missile strike on Kyiv, where she was just at home, in her apartment. We even have people who come work for us here in Prague who can't even tell their family members back in their home countries who they worked for, because if they did, they would put those family members at great risk of retaliation from the governments in those countries that are opposed to independent journalists and do not want us to be able to do truthful reporting about their policies and what is happening in their countries. So, our people are very committed to the mission and go to great lengths to advance that mission. It's an exciting organization to lead from that perspective because people know why they come to work every day and they're excited to do so. The other interesting dynamic, though, is that [this commitment from our staff] means that they are very opinionated about the mission and about the work, about what their contribution is to it, and they're not shy when they feel that management is leading the mission in a direction they don't like. And so, it creates an interesting dynamic. We have a lot of frank conversations within the company about how to tackle all of these challenging times that we've faced. But I would say that that mission-driven aspect of our work is really a key to the character of this organization and that of our workforce.
Aliceson Robinson: And Jamie, on that note, what leadership capabilities have you carried from earlier in your career to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, and how have you evolved as a leader during your time there?
Jamie Fly: I'd say a number of things. A lot of my role is engaging our external partners, fighting to protect our space to operate in many of our countries, and engaging when our journalists are under attack and fighting back. I am trying to make sure that our journalists, all of our journalists, whether they're here in Prague or in one of our 20 offices, have the safety and security that they need to do their work, and a lot of my ability to do that has been shaped by a number of my previous roles—probably most notably my time working in the US Senate, where I did a lot of work on advancing human rights, speaking out in support of human rights defenders, and engaging a broad network, a coalition of organizations: press, freedom groups, and other human rights organizations who support the work of journalists and civil society activists. And so, I use those skills on a daily basis here at the radio as we make sure that our people are as safe as we can have them be, given all of the significant challenges that we face.
Another thing I would just say that's incredibly important for us, and you highlighted earlier, is just the unique set of challenges that we and many other organizations have faced in the last several years, what with the pandemic and the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, which is now a bit over a year ago. There have been crises, you know, one after another. We’ve had to move journalists out of Russia, out of Belarus; we had to close our office in Afghanistan in late 2021. This role has required immense adaptability and flexibility. And I, just because of the types of positions I've worked in over the course of my more than 20-year career, I've always been someone who thrives in uncertain environments and can quickly adapt to new situations. This organization and this role in particular is not a role in which you can develop a five-year plan and methodically implement it. There's just too much uncertainty about and in the countries where we operate, and also too much uncertainty about our business, about the news media right now, given that news media organizations around the world are going through a digital transformation. It’s creating an entirely new dynamic that organizations need to adapt to. And so this has been a role where I think I've been able to apply a lot of those skills related to flexibility, agility, and the ability to immediately respond to new environments, because we can never predict here what we're going to be facing even, you know, within the next several weeks, let alone the next several years.
Lukasz Kiniewicz: And Jamie, how does the mission motivate the organization and influence its culture?
Jamie Fly: The great thing about the mission is that it's inspiring to everyone here, and that unites not just the journalists but also all of our support staff. Ever since the mid-90s when we moved to Prague at the invitation of then Czechoslovak President Vaclav Havel, roughly half of our staff here at headquarters have actually been Czech, which is also inspiring to us because we have many colleagues here at our headquarters who listened to RFE’s Czechoslovak service as children or young people, which at the time was broadcast from Munich but played a key role in the Velvet Revolution and events leading up to the events of 1989 that brought democracy to the Czech Republic. Or they come from families for which it's a badge of honor to work here at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty because of the role that those broadcasts played in inspiring their parents or grandparents. And so that has had a major effect on our workforce based here in Prague, and it gives us new inspiration every day. And, as I mentioned before, it's a highly motivated workforce and that really has had a deep cultural impact on us. And, on the flipside, the only thing I'd say is, again, it makes a lot of strategic conversations very frank; people aren't shy, they're opinionated, but that's also good, too, I think. People, our rank-and-file staff here, they hold senior management accountable and they want to be part of our collective decision making about what is best for this company. And I think that's really healthy for an organization of this size. We, senior management, are not just making decisions from on high and issuing edicts, we’re really engaging in an open-ended conversation with our staff across all of the countries that we operate in.
Aliceson Robinson: Jamie, you've, you've hinted at some of the complexities of the organization; you're operating in 23 countries, in 27 languages (reaching Russian-speaking audiences in 30 countries), over 20 local bureaus, with over 700 full-time journalist and 1,300 freelancers. What are the key challenges that leading such a complex organization creates?
Jamie Fly: I think the key challenge we face, probably like any large multinational organization, is related to communication. We've spent a lot of time trying to find avenues to communicate our broad strategy to the entire workforce. With an organization of this size and geographic spread, I can't just gather everyone in one room or even do one large town hall here in Prague and ensure that our company strategy will reach every single employee. So, what I've done as president over the last several years is try to get out in front of as many of our in-country staff as possible. Over the last three and a half years, I’ve visited all of our bureaus, all of our 20 bureaus except one, and I plan to visit that last one in the next several weeks. And I've visited many of those bureaus multiple times and every time I engage our staff in-country, I do town halls with those individual teams in their offices. I'll often have dinners or lunches with rank-and-file staff in each of those locations, just to hear their concerns directly to get the pulse of what they're hearing from us in Prague and whether our high-level strategy is even reaching them, what their response is to it, what they think of it. And I do similar things on the weeks that I'm not travelling. Here in Prague, I'm doing small group sessions with individual units of the company. But then also, I’ve found that the best way to engage people is in more informal settings, so over coffee or lunch. I can hear from staff directly about what their concerns are and about what their reactions are to what we're trying to deal with as a company. So, that communication between me and senior management and the staff has been a huge challenge.
The other challenge we have is really communication between all parts of the company, given the unique geographic reach of the company and the individual offices and the multinational nature of our workforce. There's only so much that I, as president, can even resolve. There are high-level policies I can set, but for our bureaus and our field staff, what they want to know is that when they need support, when they have an individual issue such as when they need a new camera or some other piece of new equipment or when they need training, they need to know that the relevant part of the company is going to be responsive to their needs and that that request is going to be met in a timely manner and that there's not going to be a lot of confusion about why they need something or how they get it approved or whether the budget is there for it. And so, in recent years, we've put a lot of work into streamlining that part of our work, the support for our field offices, the communications between Prague and our field offices. And also we are trying to foster a dialogue between our different field offices so that people feel connected to a larger whole. The good thing, post-pandemic, is that, with the widespread use of video conferencing software, that has become easier to a certain extent. But we've also tried to encourage a lot of in-person travel and even gatherings and trainings post-pandemic, because we have realized there's still no replacement for people spending some time in Prague or for staff who facilitate all these different needs of the bureaus to actually get out to the bureaus and understanding those needs firsthand. And so, we spent a lot of time in our senior management team trying to find new ways to support that sort of engagement across the company, and I think that remains an ongoing challenge.
Lukasz Kiniewicz: Looking into the future, what skill sets and capabilities will Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty's next generation of leaders need to keep the audience engaged, and how is the organization seeking and developing those leaders?
Jamie Fly: That's an incredibly important question for us at this moment. As I mentioned, the entire news media industry is going through a global transformation. Audiences are moving online and we see that in almost every country we operate, the move online and the changes to the online media landscape are also happening much faster than previous transformations in the news media industry. Where, say, 10 or 15 years ago, after there was a transition from radio to primarily TV, there was the transition from TV to digital, and now the transformations within the digital media landscape are just happening on a constant, ongoing basis. And it's meant that newsrooms have needed to reorganize, restructure. You've needed new types of talent to supplement the traditional journalistic talent. And so, we're in a mode right now, thankfully, where, due to some increases in our budget, we actually are hiring. We're hiring extensively in a number of our different key offices. And we're not always just hiring traditional journalists; we're hiring digital innovators, we're hiring social media teams, we're hiring podcast experts, digital video experts, technical people who have digital skills, because the infrastructure we need to produce digital content is different than the infrastructure that we needed to produce traditional TV or radio content. And so, identifying those new areas have been very important to the company, figuring out how we can train our existing workforce to develop and adapt to that new environment, to develop new skills, has been part of that strategy. But we've also realized that we're going to need to identify new talent on the outside and attract that talent to our operations. And so, that, I think, is going to be the immediate challenge for us in the next several years—dealing with this digital transformation, making sure that we get ahead of that digital transformation. Because what we're seeing right now with a lot of the layoffs and the challenges that some of our competitors are facing is that if you don't get ahead of that transformation and you wait too long to make those changes, they will eventually catch up with you and you're going to lose audience; you're going to become less and less relevant to your audience on a daily basis. And, ultimately, we want to be expanding our audiences as much as possible. We need to be on the platforms where they want to get news and information, rather than trying to force them to come meet us on our preferred platforms. And so, I think that's going to be the primary focus here at RFE/RL over the next 5 to 10 years.
Lukasz Kiniewicz: Jamie, thank you for making the time to speak with us today.
Jamie Fly: Thanks for having me.
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About the interviewers
Lukasz Kiniewicz (lkiniewicz@heidrick.com) is the partner in charge of Heidrick & Struggles’ Warsaw office and co-leader of the Digital Infrastructure Sector in Europe.
Aliceson Robinson (arobinson@heidrick.com) is a partner in Heidrick & Struggles’ London office and a member of the firm’s Consumer Practice.