1:50 p.m. | Updated Michele Norris, the NPR host who took a 15-month leave of absence while her husband worked for the Obama campaign, will return to the public radio network in February, NPR said Thursday.
But Ms. Norris, one of NPR’s most familiar voices, will not resume hosting “All Things Considered,” the program she, Robert Siegel and Melissa Block hosted for nearly a decade. Instead, she will be a guest host for NPR and a special correspondent.
“To try to do everything we want her to do, hosting a daily show would have been impossible,” said Margaret Low Smith, NPR’s senior vice president of news.
Audie Cornish, who took over for Ms. Norris a year ago, will remain a co-host of the afternoon news program.
Ms. Norris left her position in October 2011 when her husband, Broderick Johnson, joined President Obama’s re-election campaign as a senior adviser. At that time she thought she’d return to “All Things Considered” after the campaign. But then, during her leave of absence, she poured herself into The Race Card Project, something she had started while on a book tour in 2010 to spur conversations about race.
The project invited participants to distill their thoughts about race to six words and submit them on postcards or on social networking Web sites. “I asked people to think about their experiences, their observations, their triumphs, their laments,” she said. To date she has received more than 12,000 submissions, conveying messages like these:
— “My skin makes my life easier.”
— “Waiting for race not to matter.”
— “Don’t vote for that black guy.”
— “I am a conservative, not racist!”
— “Who do you mean by ‘they?’“
— “Underneath, we all taste like chicken.”
“At some point I realized I couldn’t walk away from it,” Ms. Norris said in a telephone interview Thursday, describing how she “accidentally tripped into this next chapter of my career.”
But hosting “All Things Considered” is “all-encompassing,” Ms. Norris said, and she wouldn’t have had enough time to devote to follow-up interviews with the respondents and features about race. So she and Ms. Smith conceived a new role for her that will include Web and radio segments related to The Race Card Project; profiles and in-depth segments about politics, the kind she has produced for years; and guest-hosting opportunities.
Ms. Smith said she also wants Ms. Norris to help NPR “dip our toe far deeper into the water of live events.”
Ms. Norris’s replacement in the afternoons, Ms. Cornish, was previously the host of “Weekend Edition Sunday.” Rachel Martin, who filled in for her on Sundays last year, will now be the permanent host of that program, NPR said.
Article source: http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/03/michele-norris-returns-to-npr/?partner=rss&emc=rss