Lynn Neary, TMC ’71, who developed National Public Radio’s religion beat in the 1990s and whose longtime role as books and arts correspondent made her arguably “the envy of English majors everywhere,” is retiring this month after a 37-year career at NPR.

“Lynn Neary’s gorgeous voice has graced NPR’s airwaves for nearly forty years,” said Ellen Silva, NPR’s chief arts editor, in announcing the news. She described Neary as “one of public radio’s most distinctive and accomplished personalities,” “an incisive intellect,” and “a wise and generous mentor to scores of reporters, producers and editors.”

Neary grew up in Westchester County and in 1971 earned an English degree from Thomas More College, then Fordham’s liberal arts college for women. After graduation, she worked at a psychiatric hospital and as an actor and waiter before landing a job as a reporter at WRMT, a commercial radio station in Rocky Mount, North Carolina.

“I knew immediately I had found the right thing to do,” she told FORDHAM magazine in 2011. “I thought, ‘Oh my god, I found it.’”

She spent a year in Rocky Mount before moving to WOSU, a public radio station in Columbus, Ohio, for two years.

Neary arrived at NPR in 1982, and after starting as a newscaster on Morning Edition, she moved on to hosting Weekend All Things Considered, the weekend version of the network’s flagship news program, from 1984 to 1992. During that time, she covered such historic events as the fall of the Berlin Wall, Nelson Mandela’s release from prison, and the Tiananmen Square Massacre, and conducted interviews with illustrious writers and artists, including Margaret Atwood, Toni Morrison, and David Byrne.

Examining Religion from All Angles

In 1992, Neary joined NPR’s cultural desk, where she developed the network’s first religion beat, covering what she described as “the religious landscape” of the country at a time when religion and politics were beginning to intersect in profound ways. She did a four-part series on Islam in America, interviewed the Dalai Lama, and covered two papal visits to the U.S. In 1996, she earned an Alfred I. duPont award for her reporting on the role of religion in the debate over welfare reform.

“We want[ed]to be able to look at religion from a cultural perspective, a faith perspective, and also a political perspective,” Neary told WFUV’s Lauren Naymie, FCRH ’11, during a 2010 interview at Fordham’s public radio station. “It’s always a subject I’ve found kind of fascinating—what people believe in and why, and how it affects the way they act in the world.”

Since 2008, Neary has served as an arts correspondent at NPR covering books and publishing, reporting not only on new releases and authors but also on industry news and trends.

She has returned to Fordham several times in recent years. In 2010, she met with students at WFUV, guest taught a communication and media studies class, and addressed her fellow alumnae at a Thomas More College reunion, where she spoke about the need for journalistic objectivity amid the increasingly hyped-up, opinionated tone of cable news.

“People think, ‘How can you be really, really objective?’ Well, you have to be very open-minded,” she said. “When I was covering religion, I was meeting up with people who believed things, whether it was a political belief or their faith, that I did not believe at all.”

She also noted the value of her early experience in Rocky Mount, the kind of small-town reporting that she believes can be beneficial to young journalists. “It was a very good experience,” she told FORDHAM magazine, “going to another part of the country, seeing how other people live.”

An Acclaimed Career Comes to a Close

Neary’s tenure at NPR has been a lesson in the ways that stories—in the news and in fiction—can take on new relevance over time.

In 1985, she interviewed the writer Margaret Atwood about her book The Handmaid’s Tale, a dystopian novel set in a near-future theocratic society in which women are subjugated. Could such a nightmare scenario come to pass, Neary asked.

“[I]f you see somebody walking towards a large hole in the ground, you’ve got two choices,” Atwood told her. “If you want them to fall into it, you don’t say anything. And if you want them not to fall into it, you say, ‘Watch where you’re going.’”

In spring 2017, shortly before the premiere of the popular TV series based on The Handmaid’s Tale, Neary had the opportunity to ask Atwood whether our society had fallen into the ditch she said her novel was warning us about 22 years earlier. Atwood told her that we hadn’t yet, and that we still have the power to change things.

This kind of reporting, with an eye toward the social implications of art and policy, has earned Neary several honors throughout her career, including a Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award, a Corporation for Public Broadcasting Gold Award, an Association of Women in Radio and Television Award, and the Catholic Press Association’s Gabriel Award.

In a recent exchange on Twitter with NPR’s Ari Shapiro, Neary expressed sadness at leaving the station while declaring her optimism about its future.

“I will miss everyone at NPR so much but I am so glad to know that my generation is leaving it in such good hands.”

A nameplate reading “Cultural Angel,” a reference to a piece she once did on the play Angels in America, is mounted above her keyboard, near the window. The space is surprisingly small for one of NPR’s signature voices, but a look around reveals a certain equality in the newsroom: everywhere people are squeezed into tiny spaces. Neary, dressed in black but with an open face and eyes lit with curiosity, lobs a comment to the music reporter on the other side of her cubicle wall before settling into her chair, ready to begin the day.

Three years ago, Neary, TMC ’71, took the books and publishing beat at NPR after occupying, since 1982, seemingly every other on-air position public radio has to offer: newscaster for Morning Edition, host of Weekend All Things Considered, religion reporter for the culture desk. She has interviewed Mayan weavers in the hidden interior of Mexico and heard David Byrne’s rough demo of the Talking Heads’ smash hit “Burning Down the House.”

“It instantly made sense to me,” she says of the transition to her current assignment. “It’s a really old-fashioned business, and I’m really old fashioned.” She paused a beat, a comedian delivering a punch line. “Now it’s completely changing.”

Neary, who has never been a business reporter, finds herself on the cutting edge of the e-book revolution, writing as much about author Ann Patchett’s literary salon in Nashville as she does about the profit margin of electronic readers. It is both exhilarating and challenging. “I try to bring a writer’s eye and a feature reporter’s sensibility” to the task, she says.

And that may well sum up her career, which didn’t begin in journalism at all, but rather in social work, with a job at a psychiatric hospital. She also acted and waited tables (more the latter than the former), before landing a job covering local news at a radio station in Rocky Mount, North Carolina. “I knew immediately I had found the right thing to do,” she recalls of her first on-air gig. “I thought, ‘Oh my god, I found it.’”

North Carolina was a long way for a Westchester County girl to go to find herself. Neary spent the first two years of her university career at Marymount College in Tarrytown, N.Y., before transferring into Fordham’s then all-female Thomas More College.

It was the late 1960s, and the world was splitting open, with Vietnam protests seizing campuses and gripping the nation. Neary wanted to be a part of it. “I wanted a bigger world than I felt like I had [in Tarrytown],” she says. An English major, then a political science major before switching back to English, Neary knew the career expectations at the time for women generally, and in her family in particular, covered a fairly small spectrum: teacher, nurse, secretary. Her acting experience tipped her off that she had a knack for performance, though, and her desire to do something socially significant led her to a course in radio journalism. The rest, as they say, is history.

She spent a year in Rocky Mount, covering Kiwanis meetings, the police and the chamber of commerce, interviewing people on the street, learning the radio news business from soup to nuts. “It was a very good experience,” she says, “going to another part of the country, seeing how other people live.”

A woman in local government suggested that Neary look into public radio. Two years at WOSU in Columbus, Ohio, followed, with Neary covering education, but taking it “a little beyond traditional education reporting,” she says. At the time, American hostages were being held in Iran, and President Carter was reinstating registration for Selective Service. Neary interviewed students on campus about the military, then went to a swearing-in ceremony for people who had just joined the service. She called NPR to tell them about the tape, some of which they used on air.

“It was one of those things,” she says, “where I happened to be ahead of the news for once in my life.” After that, NPR started calling her periodically, asking for contributions. It was only a matter of time before they came calling with a regular job. Two years as a newscaster on Morning Edition followed, then eight years as the host of Weekend All Things Considered before that led to the religion beat on the newly formed culture desk.

Neary had a tremendous curiosity about what she calls “the religious landscape” of the country at the time. The religious right was ascendant, and welfare reform was being pushed through Congress; politics and religion were intersecting in new and explosive ways, and she had her finger on the pulse. She even did a four-part piece in 1993 and 1994 on Islam in America, once again ahead of the news tide.

“She is just amazingly confident and self-possessed behind a microphone, whether hosting a program or recording a piece,” says Laura Bertran, supervising editor for the NPR arts desk and Neary’s immediate boss. “She has mastered how to talk to an audience.”

Part of that mastery has to do with Neary’s own enthusiasm for her topics, a curiosity Neary describes as part anthropological and part journalistic.

The books and publishing beat suits Neary’s home life in Washington, D.C., which includes her husband David Hall, a retired cameraman for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and her 14-year-old daughter, Maya. She could never have raised a child getting up at 2 a.m. every day to work on Morning Edition, and the weekend hours of All Things Considered began to wear on her after a while, as well. Still, those were extremely fruitful years, leading to a Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting Gold Award, and an Association of Women in Radio and Television Award, among others.

“I’ve really been a generalist. I have a curiosity and an openness to ideas and different kinds of people, and to walking into situations a lot of people might not want to go into,” she says. “I’m in a pretty happy place. I don’t know what’s next but I think I could do this for a while.”

—Julie Bourbon is a Washington, D.C.-based writer and a frequent contributor to this magazine.

This was just one of the anecdotes that Lynn Neary, TMC ’71, shared on Oct. 25 with about 60 alumnae of Thomas More College at the Midtown Manhattan headquarters of Kaplan, Inc.

The reunion brought together alumnae of Fordham’s “most selective college” —so nicknamed students had the highest average SAT scores and GPAs of any school in the university’s history. It was an all-women’s college from 1964 to 1974, before being folded into Fordham College at Rose Hill.

Neary parlayed a job at a small radio station in Rocky Mount, N.C., into a career at National Public Radio. Since arriving at NPR in 1982, she has risen through the ranks and is currently the arts correspondent. She spent the afternoon at Rose Hill, meeting 15 students at WFUV/90.7FM, and teaching a telecommunications/media ethics class.

Much of her talk at Kaplan focused on her interactions with students, on a campus she had not been to in 40 years.

“Journalism is changing so much, and they have to learn how to report across multiple platforms—radio, television, print, the Web, Twitter, Facebook and everything. I still say to them that it’s a good idea, especially if you’re in a big metropolitan area, to get out into the country and go to a place where you can get the kind of experience I got in Rocky Mount.

“I got to do everything, and every time I’d master one skill, they’d say, ‘Hey, now can you do an interview show?’”

In addition to working in a field that’s morphed from radio, TV and newspapers to full-time cable news organizations, myriad websites and social media, Neary noted that the her own beat—book publishing—was also changing faster than she’d once thought possible. Kindles, Nooks and iPads, for instance, are very much poised to relegate books to the dustbin.

“A year ago, I was convinced that was never going to happen, and now one year later, I’m about to do a story on it. That’s how fast it’s all moving,” she said.

She did not weigh in on the Oct. 20 firing of her colleague Juan Williams, for comments he made on Fox News about Muslims, noting that it was far from her sphere of influence on the arts desk.

“I’m not going to give my personal opinion. It can get you in trouble,” she said to laughter. “But it has made me think about what’s going on in journalism today, and as I said, I met with some journalism students today, which got me thinking about it even more.”

One problem facing journalism, she said, is the amount of hype used to sell it on cable news channels.

“I’ve gotten phone calls in recent years from relatives and friends, asking me about a story with just, this sense of urgency about it, and as if something terrible is happening, and I’ll ask them, ‘Have you been watching CNN?’” she said.

The other is the question of what’s the difference between opinion and hype.

“People think, ‘How can you be really, really objective?’ Well, you have to be very open-minded,” she said. “When I was covering religion, I was meeting up with people who believed things, whether it was a political belief or their faith, that I did not believe at all.”

“If you’ve really reported the story and you’ve really done the research, and you really know the subject, then you have the right to give some analysis. But there is definitely confusion between opinion and journalism now, and a lot of people in the public are confusing the two.”