William Hugh Kling

Kling has a BA in economics from Saint John's University, Collegeville, Minnesota and an MS from the Graduate School of Communications at Boston University. In 1964, he was asked by Saint John's University (where he had just earned his baccalaureate in economics) to attend graduate school in mass communications at Boston University and return to build a radio station.That station became the first in a series of 44 public radio stations ranging from Minnesota to Los Angeles and Miami. Kling is the recipient of honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degrees from Saint John's University (2011) and The College of St. Scholastica, Duluth, Minnesota (2013). In 2014 he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

The first station, KSJR-FM, went on the air in January 1967, and was later spun off into a separate nonprofit community corporation (MPR), of which Kling was the founding president. Over the years, he helped lead the station to grow into a statewide network in Minnesota while building similar networks in California and Florida. He was a founding director of NPR and in 1983 he created a nationwide public radio distribution arm (American Public Media (APM)).

Kling served as president and CEO of American Public Media Group (APMG) until June 2011. APMG is the nonprofit parent support organization of Minnesota Public Radio (MPR), Southern California Public Radio (SCPR), Classical South Florida (CSF), and American Public Media (APM), and is the sole shareholder of the for-profit Greenspring Company. Kling also served as CEO of MPR|APM and of Greenspring Company and Vice Chair of SCPR and CSF.

As president of MPR|APM, Kling was responsible for MPR's three regional networks of 38 public radio stations (serving five million people in the Upper Midwest) and its national program production centers in Saint Paul, London, New York, and Los Angeles. American Public Media is the second-largest national producer of public radio programming, after National Public Radio (NPR) in Washington. Southern California Public Radio, of which Kling serves as vice-chair, operates radio stations KPCC (Pasadena) and KUOR (Redlands) under public service operating agreements with their respective licensees. SCPR serves 14 million people in the Los Angeles area. Kling was a founding board memebr of NPR in 1972. A founder of the Station Resource Group, the strategic think tank for public radio. A founder of the Association of Public Radio Stations which was the Washington DC representitation organization of the public Radio industry. He conceptualized the idea of The Public Radio Company, which was meant to help struggling stations re-organize their structure and fund their new models of operation.

The Greenspring Company, of which Kling was president until 2011, is the parent company for Greenspring Media Group, a diversified regional and national magazine publishing and event management company. In 1998, Greenspring sold another subsidiary, Rivertown Trading Company, to the Target Corporation for $134 million. Greenspring was sold in 2013.

Kling's tactics have come under fire as being aggressive. MPR, for example, bought rival classical-programming public radio station WCAL in Northfield, Minnesota when its owner, St. Olaf College, offered it for sale in 2004, eliminating a competitor for donor funds and switching the station's format to a widely successful alternative rock format hailed by younger Minnesotans. [1]

On September 10, 2010, Kling announced that he was retiring as president of APMG and MPR as of June 2011. He said he intended to encourage a national fundraising effort to improve public media reporting strength and newsgathering capability in his role as President Emeritus of American Public Media. [2]

Twin Cities MAgazine gave him their Hall of Fame Award of Distinction as Twin Citian of the Year in 1986. He was inducted into the PAvic Museum's Minnesota Broadcast Hall of Fame. Both the Minneapolis StarTribune and The St. Paul Pioneer Press listed Kling as one of 100 most significant Minnesotans of the Century in 2000.

In 2017 Minnesota Public Radio named its headquarters "The Kling Media Center" after him.