Today’s Good News: Growth at NPR
Yes, we all have our problems with National Public Radio and NPR stations. But given the wasteland at commercial radio today, NPR makes radio that is ever more essential. The good news is that they are growing in a lot of different and welcome directions. A recent profile of NPR chief executive Ken Stern (who joined NPR in 1999) in the Wall St. Journal brought the good news. First the good news for the current products: 25.5 million tune into NPR programming each week. That’s almost double what it was 10 years ago. It has more than 800 member stations, up from 635. In a number of markets, including Seattle, Morning Edition is #1.
Now for the new stuff: NPR is making a new morning show geared to “younger listeners,” (I’ll leave it to your imagination what “younger” means), it’s called the Bryant Park Project. A separate new morning show is coming next year from a consortium of producers including New York’s WNYC, the BBC, and PRI.
And, in November, NPR will launch an expanded online music service focused on new music and new artists. I was a little startled to hear in the past week both Annie Lennox and Mick Jagger promoting their new albums on NPR. It was nice to hear intelligent and relatively lengthy discussions with the two. NPR does a good job with music and I look forward to hearing more.
AND, a couple of good choices NPR made for spending the $200 million Kroc gift: They hired 80 new reporters. And they created new fellowships for young people, wherein they spend 9 months at the network and 3 months at a member station, to help “build the future of public radio.”
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