Tina Pamintuan

Tina Lacdao Pamintuan has spent over 20 years in public media as a journalist, educator and leader. As the CEO of St. Louis Public Radio, she helms the station’s fundraising, operations, programming and editorial teams. This multifaceted role also includes being the liaison for the station’s FCC license holder, the University of Missouri, and the station’s advisory board, Friends of KWMU, Inc.

Before making the leap to Missouri, Tina made her home in cities along the west and east coasts. In San Francisco, she was the general manager of KALW, where she founded the nonprofit KALW Public Media and negotiated a long-anticipated legal agreement with the station’s license holder to operate the station independently from the city. Over a short tenure, she brought the station into labor and FCC compliance and led the station’s first professional rebranding and marketing efforts. She also programmed the station to attract a more diverse and younger listening audience, bringing more BIPOC voices to air both nationally and locally. As part of the station’s new eclectic music initiative, KALW also saw the opening of its first studio in the east bay under her leadership.

In New York, she created and directed the audio journalism program at The Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY where she taught radio writing and reporting, news magazine production, audio documentary and oral history. She now enjoys hearing former students on-air reporting from stations across the country, launching their own investigative series and podcasts and producing and hosting for nationally syndicated programs.

In 2011, she traveled to the Philippines on an International Center for Journalists’ fellowship to report on climate change and biofuel use in rural areas. In 2012, she produced an audio documentary on Occupy Wall Street hosted by Alex Chadwick. She’s a former Nieman Visiting Fellow and Scholar-in-Residence at the Tow Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism. In 2015, she organized a seminar on Native American media and community radio for the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study at Harvard. She was honored to receive the Philippine American Press Club’s 2019 Ocampo-Henry Memorial Award in Radio, but even more delighted when her mother, who always wanted to become a journalist, accepted the award on her behalf. She began her career at National Public Radio after graduating from Georgetown University where she studied philosophy and physics.

Tina is a board member at the Mesa Refuge, as well as an alum. As the Mesa Refuge’s Bernstein Parker Activist Writer Fellow in 2021, she worked on op-eds about the “newsroom reckonings” over the last few years and most recently since the killing of George Floyd.