Steve Drummond

Executive Producer- NPR

Steve Drummond is a senior editor and executive producer at NPR who has held a variety of roles in more than two decades at the network. Since its launch in 2014, he has headed the education reporting project, NPR Ed. The nine-member team provides deep, comprehensive coverage of learning and education and extends that reporting to audiences across many platforms. In 2018, the team launched the Student Podcast Challenge. Now in its fifth year, the national contest has received podcast entries from more than 50,000 students in grades 5-12, from all 50 states and the District of Columbia. In 2021 a college version was added that offers a $5,000 scholarship to the grand-prize winner.

From 2017 to 2022, Drummond was also the executive producer of Code Switch, NPR’s award-winning podcast and reporting team on race and identity. During that period the national audience for Code Switch grew steadily, notably with the addition of a radio program that now airs on 197 stations. In 2020, Code Switch was named by Apple Podcasts as its first-ever Show of the Year. He remains an editor-at-large with the team.

From 2007 to 2013 he was NPR’s Senior National Editor, overseeing domestic news coverage and a team of more than 60 reporters, producers and editors in Washington, D.C., and 18 bureaus around the country. In 2012, he also served as acting Senior Editor for Investigations, managing a team of six reporters and producers on investigative projects.

Drummond brings to his work more than 25 years’ experience covering education issues. In addition to his journalism credentials, Drummond has also spent some time in the classroom. In the early 1990s, he left journalism temporarily, for a graduate degree in education and a brief career as a middle and high school teacher. His journalism and education interests merged in 1993, when he joined Education Week, where he spent six years as a senior editor and writer.

Following several years as a newspaper and magazine reporter, Drummond joined NPR in 2000 as an editor on the national desk. From 2003 to 2004 he was the senior editor of All Things Considered. His work has been honored with many of journalism’s highest awards, including three Peabody Awards, two Alfred I. DuPont-Columbia University awards, the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award, and the Edward R. Murrow Award.

Drummond holds a bachelor’s degree and two master’s degrees, in journalism and education, from the University of Michigan. In the fall of 2013 he was a Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton University, and currently teaches journalism at the University of Maryland.

He is the author of The Watchdog: How the Truman Committee Battled Corruption and Helped Win World War Two, to be published in May 2023.