May 19, 2026
— Jeff Ward, Lehigh Valley News Briefs
Lehigh Valley Public Media is looking for a vice president of content and the shrinking not-for-profit organization is will pay $150,000 to $180,000 annually.
That salary at a thriving public or private media enterprise would be reasonable, but this is Lehigh Valley Public Media, also Channel 39, also WLVR 91.3 FM. It’s a public operation with a public mission, though nobody appears to know what that mission is.
LVPM has not distinguished itself in recent years. Among its bad moves:
— burning $40 million over five years of public money from its public endowment for no gain to the public. An operations audit is needed. It probably will never happen, but where did all that money go? Not to those Father Brown reruns.
— Cutting its staff from about 80 to 27 as of today. They spent $40 million … to get smaller?
— Paying big salaries to the people in charge during the years of reckless spending. The station was running multi-million-dollar deficits while paying the top four “people who worked there” more than $200,000 each.
— Taking over Lehigh University’s radio station for no apparent purpose and with no apparent goal.
Last year, one now-former director said LVPM should stop asking for money until it figures out what its mission is. The response was, in short, they need money just because they need money. That’s my interpretation.
They have about $82 million in the bank, courtesy of the auction of public airwaves. That money covered up a lot of sins, but management and oversight has been disastrous all the same.
Here’s a telephone pitch for a contribution: “Hello, this is your good neighbor at Lehigh Valley Public Media. We have $82 million in the bank. Do you have any money to give us?”
As of December, the board of directors of LVPM conceded that things weren’t working out too well. Finances, programming, pretty much everything, all compounded by a glacial response to an obvious disaster.
Still, LVPM can pay $150,000 to $180,000 for a vice president of content.
Mostly, the job appears to be focused on “this role oversees journalism, content production, and community-generated content, ensuring all content is strategically aligned, clearly governed, and effectively distributed to grow audience, deepen engagement, and support revenue.”
See this this link for details if you want a job at a place that pays people with titles a lot more money than they deserve.
Below is a cut-and-paste look at this opportunity, complete with buzzwords such as transformational, participatory, engagement, workflows and best practices:
Lehigh Valley News Briefs 