Award-winning broadcast journalist and media executive Cinny Kennard served as Managing Director/Managing Editor of NPR West from 2003 to 2009. As part of her broad leadership responsibilities, she had editorial and operational oversight of the facility, including two daily programs, News & Notes and Day to Day. She built NPR West from 20 to nearly 90 full-time NPR employees. Previously, she served as an executive project director and journalism professor at the USC Annenberg’s School of Journalism. Prior to that she was a CBS News correspondent based in Los Angeles, London and Moscow. She wrote, produced and broadcast stories ranging from the 1992 civil unrest in the wake of the Rodney King verdict, the 1994 uprising in Moscow and much of the war in the former Yugoslavia. She covered the 2002 California gubernatorial campaign for KCET-TV in Los Angeles and has worked as a correspondent and host for television stations in Dallas, Houston and Ft. Wayne, Ind. Her broadcast career began in 1977 at WNLK Radio in Norwalk, Conn., where she was a reporter, anchor and talk show host. Kennard has launched several projects aimed at improving broadcast journalism. Among them, she served as the executive director of Reliable Resources, the $1.5 million Pew Charitable Trust/USC Annenberg project to improve broadcast television political coverage. She is a co-founder and executive board member of the Carole Kneeland Project for Responsible Television Journalism and served for nine years as a member of the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award jury for excellence in broadcast journalism. Kennard's journalism awards include a 1990-91 Alfred I. duPont-Columbia Award for coverage of the Persian Gulf War. She is a graduate of Northeastern University in Boston.

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