Rick Schneider is President & CEO of Community Television Foundation of South Florida, Inc. (CTF), and its affiliates, WPBT Communications Foundation, Inc. and Comtel, Inc.
CTF operates WPBT2, the community-licensed public television station located in Miami. He joined the station in 2004.
WPBT2 serves South Florida from the Treasure Coast to Key West. It is the presenting station and production home of Nightly Business Report, distributed nationally to the public television system. WPBT2 also operates uVu, a community online video service, and is the Miami outlet for V-me, the Spanish-language public television service.
Schneider serves as chair of the Board of Directors of FPBS, Inc., the association of Florida public broadcasting stations. He also sits on the board of the Public Television Major Market Group. He was on the Board of Directors of PBS from 2003 to 2009, serving as professional vice-chair in 2009.
He is a member of the Board of Governors of the Greater Miami Chamber of Commerce and the Department of Telecommunication Advisory Council at the University of Florida.
From 1998-2004, he was president & general manager of Channel 5 Public Broadcasting (KNPB), the public television station serving the Reno/Lake Tahoe region. During his tenure KNPB conducted its conversion to Digital Television. While in Reno Schneider served a term as chair of the Pacific Mountain Network and was on the board of the Small Station Association.
He previously served as news director and then station manager at WUFT-TV, the PBS station licensed to the University of Florida in Gainesville. As news director he taught television reporting in UF’s College of Journalism & Communication. He hosted the public affairs program North Florida Journal and was honored with a Scripps-Howard National Journalism Award for television documentary, A Community Crisis: The Gainesville Student Murders.
His early career was in commercial broadcast news, as a reporter and anchor in Gainesville (WCJB), West Palm Beach (WPTV), and New York City (WPIX), and as a Washington correspondent for Post-Newsweek Stations, including WPLG in Miami.
Schneider holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of Florida College of Journalism & Communication and a master’s degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, where he was awarded a McCloy Fellowship for reporting in Germany.
Rick and his wife Karen have two college-age children.
