BU trustee Andrew Lack will retake the helm of NBC News in April, returning to an operation he led from 1993 to 2001. NBCUniversal CEO Steve Burke announced in a memo to staff on Friday, March 6, that Lack (CFA’68) will be chair of NBC News and MSNBC.

“Andy’s experience and familiarity with our company, and specifically the news division, will be critical to our growth and future success,” Burke wrote. Lack replaces Pat Fili-Krushel, who will take on a new role at the company.

Lack’s first challenge at NBC will be deciding the fate of Nightly News anchor Brian Williams, who was suspended without pay for six months after acknowledging last month that he had repeatedly exaggerated the danger he faced while reporting from Iraq in 2003. Williams and Lack are said to be close friends, and Williams was selected to succeed longtime anchor Tom Brokaw during Lack’s previous tenure at NBC.

“Andy confronts problems the way hammers confront nails,” says Thomas Fiedler (COM’71), dean of the College of Communication. “Bang, bang, done. He’s a straight-ahead, get-it-done leader who will make the decisions he believes need to be made and then will move on. One reason so many of NBC’s present and former stars—Matt Lauer, Meredith Vieira, Katie Couric, and of course, Brian Williams—remain loyal to him is that he is completely without pretense or guile, even when his decisions may not appear to have been in their best interests.”

Lack, who chairs the Board of Trustees Governance Committee, comes to NBC from the Broadcasting Board of Governors, where he was CEO, a post he had held for only six weeks. Prior to that he was CEO and chair of Bloomberg Media Group.

Lack’s commitment to quality journalism is evident in his 2012 gift to COM, which helped create the Andrew R. Lack Professorship, intended to provide the resources and scholarship to analyze new business models that may support serious journalism in the years ahead.

The gift arose “from Andy’s concern that accountability journalism—the kind of journalism that the First Amendment’s free-press clause is intended to protect—is endangered by the collapse of the old business models that supported newspapers and TV news until the internet era,” Fiedler said at the time.

The first Lack Professor, New York Times media columnist David Carr, died February 12 after collapsing in the Times newsroom. A replacement has not yet been chosen.

In addition to resolving Williams’ future, Lack is charged with boosting the sagging ratings of NBC’s once-dominant morning news broadcast, Today, which has fallen behind Good Morning America since the controversial departure of Ann Curry in 2012. He will also have to address the ratings declines that have plagued Meet the Press and MSNBC.

Observers say Lack was chosen for the job because of his long history of cleaning up messes.

“I’m usually offered jobs where there is something big and broken,” Lack told Bostonia in a 2011 profile. “There is a group of people and that’s their line of work. I was always in the group chosen for things that needed to be rewired, or started from scratch.”

Lack got his start in TV news as a producer at CBS, including on 60 Minutes. He remained at CBS until 1993, when he was recruited to help NBC recover from a PR debacle. Today and NBC Nightly News both climbed to number one in the ratings during his first tenure running NBC News as president.

But when he first took over, the operation was struggling after the revelation that fiery footage of GM pickup trucks on the newsmagazine show Dateline had in fact been faked. Lack “immediately righted the ship,” Neal Shapiro, who took over as Dateline producer under Lack, told Bostonia.

In 2001, Lack was promoted to president and COO of NBC, where he was responsible for news, entertainment, TV stations, MSNBC, and CNBC, which will not be under his direction this time around.