Sarah Morris

Sarah Morris is general manager of KCUR 89.3, Kansas City's NPR station, and 91.9 Classical KC. Since taking the role in 2021, she has led the stations through the loss of federal funding, the closure of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and a five-week scramble out of their longtime home, all with no disruption for the audience.

Today KCUR and Classical KC are100% community supported, fiercely local, and fully independent. Sarah will happily tell you she'd rather bet the station's future on the people of Kansas City than on the people in Washington, D.C., any day.

Under her leadership, KCUR has become one of the most collaborative and influential newsrooms in public media. It is home to Harvest Public Media, which covers food and agriculture across nine states, and the Midwest Newsroom, NPR's journalism hub for Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, and Nebraska, which Sarah helped build. Closer to home, she guided the launch of the KC Media Collective, a partnership of six nonprofit newsrooms strengthening civic journalism across the metro, and created KCUR Studios, whose podcasts reach more than 100,000 downloads each month.

Sarah came to public media after nearly two decades of executive leadership in the private and nonprofit sectors, most recently heading strategic marketing and communications for the University of Missouri–Kansas City, where she oversaw KCUR from 2004 to 2020. That blend of corporate rigor and mission focus shapes how she leads: decisive, data-minded, and relentless about turning good ideas into results for the community.

She serves on the NPR Board of Directors, where she makes sure mid-market stations and the heartland have a strong voice at the national table. She previously served on the boards of the Station Resource Group and the CASE Communications Commission.

A Kansas City native, Sarah is a diehard Chiefs fan and was an advocate for women's sports long before it was cool. She served on the Kansas City Sports Commission board and chaired the boards of WIN for KC and the Rose Brooks Center. She holds an MBA from Baker University and a bachelor's degree in journalism from the University of Colorado Boulder.

Sarah is fond of Christiane Amanpour's line that a journalist's job is "to be truthful, not neutral," and she firmly believes civility should never be confused with passivity. Her favorite thing to hear around town: "I heard it on KCUR."