Barbara Maushard was named senior vice president, news, of Hearst Television in 2016, after having served since 2008 as vice president, news. She sets strategy for Hearst Television’s news operations and has management oversight of the corporate-level news team.

Under Maushard’s stewardship, Hearst Television stations have consistently earned television journalism’s highest national honors — including ten consecutive Walter Cronkite Awards for Excellence in TV Political Journalism from the USC Annenberg School, dozens of National Edward R. Murrow Awards, National Headliner Awards and a prestigious National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) Service to America Award.

Maushard has also spearheaded multifaceted, groupwide, extended journalism and community outreach projects — most recently with “Forecasting Our Future,” an initiative using the combined resources of more than 100 meteorologists around the country to explore the impact of weather and climate on local communities. Additional projects have included “State of Addiction,” addressing the nation’s opioid crises, and Project CommUNITY, exploring the nation’s divisions region by region — which helped earn Hearst Television a Broadcasting & Cable magazine 2019 Station Group of the Year honor; the publication also noted that “the stations were their usual local powerhouses in news and community affairs.”

In 2020 Maushard was recognized with one of television journalism’s highest individual honors: the First Amendment Leadership Award from the Radio Television Digital News Foundation (RTDNF). The award “is presented to a business, government or other leader who has made a significant contribution to the protection of the First Amendment and freedom of the press.”

Maushard has worked at four Hearst stations since 1997, serving as news director at three of them: KHBS/KHOG (Fort Smith/Fayetteville, Arkansas), WISN (Milwaukee, Wisconsin) and WESH (Orlando, Florida). Under her news stewardship, WISN-TV launched seven and a half hours of local news programming and was honored with both a George Foster Peabody Award and a National Edward R. Murrow Award, among other honors. Maushard joined the company at KMBC-TV in Kansas City, Missouri, where she was part of a team that won a Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) award. She began her career at WHOI in her hometown of Peoria, Illinois, later working at WCMH, Columbus, Ohio and WMAR, Baltimore, Maryland.

Among other industry roles, Maushard serves on the boards of NBC News Channel and the Kneeland Project for Responsible Journalism. She previously served on the board of the Library of American Broadcasting Foundation and was vice-chair of the ABC News Directors Advisory Board. She is a member of the Radio Television Digital News Association (RTDNA). Additionally, she serves on the news leadership council for the Trust Project, an international consortium of news organizations working to help consumers identify trusted sources of news. She also serves on Hearst Television’s Women Employee Resource Group.
Maushard graduated with a degree in Broadcast Journalism from Bradley University in Peoria.