Mixed Signals

At the end of summer, the leaders of the nearly 250 public radio stations in the United States received a memo from NPR headquarters in Washington — “the mother ship,” as many station employees call it — about coverage plans for the coming months. Each station has its own hosts, reporters, and management, but memos like this have a tremendous bearing on those stations, because NPR shows like “Morning Edition” and “All Things Considered” are the tentpoles of the broadcast day. And for the last few years, those tentpoles had been sinking. Ratings at stations across the country dropped an average of 22% from 2017. 

In the memo, NPR Editor-in-Chief Edith Chapin outlined plans to hold onto, and even grow, the listening audience. The “one-size-fits-all” approach for radio, podcasts, and digital “does not work,” she wrote. The platforms have different audiences and they need unique attention, particularly on radio, where the audience was not only shrinking but was also getting older. “More than two thirds of our broadcast audience is over 45, but for more than five years the only age demographic that has grown in that audience are those over 65,” Chapin wrote. The new plan was to focus on securing listeners between the ages of 40 and 64 with stories that run for less than five minutes and focus on “personal relevance” to the audience. More stories would center on “joy and wonder, space and science, personal finance, health and wellness.” (The memo also promised that NPR would “address tactics for podcasts and digital in the months ahead.”)

In response to questions about the memo, NPR says this doesn’t signal a retreat from politics or other core coverage areas — it’s an effort to engage and attract the audience most likely to listen to FM radio by giving them stories in a style that research shows keeps them listening.

The push for steadier and stronger broadcast listenership comes at a time of intense challenges from digital audio and personnel cuts across the public radio system. A New York Times story last spring laid bare the challenges NPR faces, including lower sponsorship revenue, difficulty diversifying staff and audiences, and concerns about strategy from the stations that carry NPR shows and support the network through licensing payments. These stations are each facing their own difficulties, and while some are developing strategies to secure a local audience, others are hoping for support and guidance from the mother ship. “There is no single equation for every station,” Chapin wrote in an email comment. “And that’s why we’re working closely with our station partners to address these different factors.”

Not long ago, many of these stations were growing. Revenue to NPR and stations, as well as spending on programming and news, climbed throughout the 2010s. Stations hired journalists and launched new reporting initiatives. They invested in digital news; some in Washington, Los Angeles, New York, and Chicago even bought imperiled digital news publications. At times, it seemed like stations might be the key to keeping their communities from becoming news deserts. The money for these investments came from a variety of sources — foundations, major donors, grants (though federal funding for public radio is a small and shrinking amount) — but members, acquired largely through on-air pledge drives, were always the stations’ most vital source of support. 

Through this digital transformation, radio remained resilient, the rare legacy medium that had a reliable and profitable audience. “If you looked at what was happening with traditional media, if you looked at newspapers, it was not happening to radio,” says Jim Taszarek, founder of Market Enginuity, a company that sells sponsorships for public radio stations. (Called underwriting, these sponsorships are essentially the nonprofit equivalent of advertising, with restrictions on what can be said.) In 2014, the analytics firm Edison Research found that of all the time people spent listening to audio — music, podcasts, anything — half of it went to radio.

In the last two years, stations have encountered what several people I talked to described as a “perfect storm” of technological disruption, news fatigue, and the pandemic, which led to a drop in ratings. Lower ratings made pledge drives less effective. Competition for financial support encroached from all sides — from behemoths like The New York Times, from startup nonprofit newsrooms, and from any podcast with a Patreon page. Sponsors, meanwhile, opted to micro-target audiences online through Google and Facebook, rather than try to reach an aging and shrinking listenership through radio. That spending has only shrunk further under post-pandemic inflation, with sponsors looking for safer, surer bets and having more places to spend than ever. 

The result is layoffs. Local stations and the NPR mother ship in Washington have cut more than 400 jobs in nearly two years. Sometimes these cuts have chipped away at the digital investment that once seemed essential to the stations’ futures. Leadership at WAMU in Washington, D.C. (full disclosure: I worked there for many years), shut down the DCist news site and fired most of its staff six years after purchasing it amid much fanfare about shoring up local news. Stations WNYC and LAist (formerly KPCC) made multiple rounds of cuts, slashing their staff by double-digit percentages, including deep reductions in podcasting divisions. 

Radio had once subsidized growth. Now it’s a fraying lifeline, and stations are figuring out what it means to be public radio when broadcast radio is less important than ever. “Total media ad sales has grown, total audio consumption has been steady,” Daphne Kwon, NPR’s chief financial officer, said in a statement. “There are simply more choices than ever for consumers both on platform and content which makes everything tougher for traditional media providers.” 

To some degree, the pandemic accelerated what many people in the industry saw as inevitable as digital media expanded and audiences aged. “We really believed, or at least I believed, that the runway we had with broadcast listenership was much longer than it actually was, and I was pretty pessimistic to begin with,” says Kristen Muller, chief content officer of LAist. (Muller left LAist in October, but spoke to Nieman Reports for this story before announcing her resignation.) “If you'd asked [at the] beginning of 2020, I would have said five years. It turned out to be six months.”

LAist, in many ways, exemplifies just how quickly the decline hit and how difficult the move to digital revenue is proving to be. The station, one of two major NPR outlets serving Los Angeles, had a robust audio operation: It broadcast to the region’s significant commuting population with a mix of NPR shows and its own original programming. In 2018, the station, then going by its FM call letters KPCC, purchased the LAist news site, which was among several sites shuttered by the Gothamist organization and bought by public radio stations. In 2019, the station organized its podcast production under a division called LAist Studios. 

These were boom years for public radio. Audiences were hungry to follow the 2016 election and the early years of the Trump administration. In the fall of 2016, listeners to public radio stations across the country brought NPR its highest-ever broadcast ratings. Radio ratings always have peaks and valleys, and some softening seemed inevitable after such fast growth. Around 2019, the concept of “news fatigue” began affecting many news outlets, which saw that their election-era gains might soon fall off. 

In any other year, such a drop might be thought of as a routine valley or a correction to a new normal. But before anyone could determine what a new normal for ratings might be, the Covid-19 pandemic upended listening entirely in a way that radio hasn’t, and may never, recover from. 

Without the daily commuter audience, listening plummeted. KPCC, like many other stations, was able to secure money from the federal Payroll Protection Program. Muller saw this as a time to further lean into LAist and LAist Studios. “That money was essentially socked away into reserves, and we believed that in order to aggressively build a new audience … we needed to resource it. And so we essentially made the bet that investing in our digital audience growth with that money would pay off, and that we'd find a way to monetize that digital audience as we went along,” she says. 

In 2023, the station rebranded as LAist, dropping its call letters and embracing a digital identity on-air. On paper, the move recognized an inevitable trend for FM radio. When Covid restrictions lifted, many listeners continued commuting, but they did it less — two days a week instead of five, for example. Others had grown used to new routines built around podcasts, and many were driving cars that defaulted to Bluetooth connections instead of FM radio. By 2023, the number of people listening to radio had dropped 21 percent from 2018. In 2024, Edison Research found that listeners spent more time with their phones than with the radio, and more time with on-demand audio (podcasts, audiobooks, playlists, YouTube) than linear (streaming or broadcast radio). 

Podcasting doesn’t generate as much revenue as radio, which became clear in 2023, in both for-profit and public media. Spotify, which had previously invested a billion dollars in the medium, cut jobs and canceled shows, as did stations like WNYC. Ad sales weren’t making back the investment for most shows. Meanwhile, small podcasters proliferated on platforms where fans could give a nominal amount to support their favorite shows. More than 40,000 podcasters earned a collective $350 million on Patreon in 2023. These shows aren’t necessarily journalistic (or even full-time jobs), but they are competing for attention and dollars from people who might otherwise listen and pledge to public radio. “We used to be the only crowdfunders out there,” says Abby Goldstein, president of the Public Media Content Collective, essentially a group of local public radio station leaders who decide what their stations puts on their airwaves, websites, and podcast feeds. “Nobody else was asking audiences for money, and now everybody's asking audiences for money.” In June 2023, citing declining revenue, LAist cut 12% of its staff, or 21 jobs. 

At the same time as the collapse of podcast ads, underwriting fell off a cliff for LAist. The writers’ and actors’ strikes in Hollywood froze promotion and production of movies and television, which locked out a major segment of LAist’s support. As that money began flowing again, it went to other outlets. “All these entertainment companies who used to rely on places like us, you know, now they've got a gajillion niche publications and gajillion niche podcasts that are only focused on the entertainment industry. So the money starts flowing differently,” Muller says. 

Even stations in markets that haven’t experienced a similar disruption have noticed on-air sponsorship opportunities vanishing. “Sponsors and advertisers want to avoid news. It just feels too negative to them,” Taszarek says. The larger threat, though, is the drop in radio sponsorship altogether. About half of local sponsorship money is now spent on digital ads, including services from Facebook and Google, which more precisely target users based on web activity, Taszarek adds. Many stations simply haven’t built up the digital audience and sponsorship networks to compete with this new reality. “There are good digital products and we can sell them. There's just not enough,” Taszarek says. “There's just not enough to replace broadcast.” 

This past summer, LAist laid off another 21 staff members. Among the reasons for the cuts was a budget shortfall caused by what Muller at the time called “slower-than-anticipated digital monetization” after the digital rebrand. 

“I’m saying this knowing it's going to be controversial, but we weren't quick enough to truly understand what it takes to drive digital loyalty,” Muller says. She cites the idea that it takes some listeners 10 years of regularly hearing NPR before they decide to donate. “Entire companies have come and gone in 10 years,” she says. “You just don't have that kind of window.” 

LAist has also faced controversies over management and leadership. Tax filings for 2021 showed that a former CEO earned $500,000 as president emeritus even after retiring. In light of this, the union (LAist is represented by SAG-AFTRA) called staff cuts an “outrage.” Executive pay at WNYC has also been a sticking point in negotiations over layoffs. There, SAG-AFTRA argued that the cuts would hurt their ability to serve the city and could be avoided through furloughs, office changes, or reductions in  executive pay, among other options. And at Capital Public Radio in Sacramento, $760,000 went to the former general manager in mysterious payments that are still being investigated. Beyond the hefty payments, headlines about big spending can make listeners question whether they should give. “We're painting a picture of an organization where everybody is working their fingers to the bone and barely able to make a living, and that does describe some of the people who are working at public radio stations and in public broadcasting, but it definitely is not what's happening at the top of the shiniest and most prominent stations,” says Alicia Montgomery, a 20-year employee at NPR who is now vice president of audio at Slate. 

During the pandemic, staff at a number of stations have unionized, and while union shops have still seen cuts, employees are building a bargaining power they previously lacked — pushing for cuts to come from overall spending and management structures instead of from the newsroom rank and file. Muller says LAist executives took a 10 percent pay reduction in the last round of budget-cutting.

After the cuts and with a mix of revenue, Muller says LAist is now on track to hit its budget for the next fiscal year. Broadcast is still the main source of revenue, though Muller says digital is growing quickly. “The public radio mission in 20 years is not going to be on the radio,” Muller says. 

Layoffs in journalism have hardly been limited to public radio. Some 2,700 jobs were cut across the industry in 2023, with the pace continuing into 2024. But as the stability of FM and sponsorship faltered, public radio was no longer isolated from the tumult. In 2023, NPR cut about 100 employees. New York Public Radio, which operates WNYC, cut about 40. This year, the cuts have seemed almost constant: 15 at Colorado Public Radio; eight at Louisville Public Media; 26 more at WNYC; 19 at KQED in San Francisco; 14 in Chicago; 31 at WGBH in Boston. The other Boston NPR station, WBUR, cut 14% of its staff. (I also worked at Louisville Public Media and WBUR.)

For stations, finding a sustainable future isn’t just a question of monetization but of local identity. Most station schedules consist almost entirely of national programming, from NPR or outlets like PRX and American Public Media, nonprofit organizations that produce and distribute shows. Many stations brand themselves as a city’s or region’s “NPR News Station.” They air local newscasts, feature stories, and programs, but these are generally in line with NPR’s production style and editorial guidance, creating a consistent flow throughout the day. Sometimes the sound is so seamless that listeners may not even know their local station’s call letters, or that the station is an independent entity and not a bureau or branch of NPR. 

The value, and meaning, of this localization has changed as more listeners have moved to digital platforms. More than just taking listeners away from radio, podcasting (however unprofitable it may be) has made it easier than ever for listeners to bypass stations and listen to their favorite shows on demand, on whichever device and through whichever app they prefer. NPR doesn’t offer the full “Morning Edition” or “All Things Considered” shows as podcasts, but it does turn some of their segments into podcasts — “Up First” in the morning and “Consider This” in the afternoon. Many other shows, like the ever-popular “Wait, Wait … Don’t Tell Me!”, are available as podcasts.

“We’re all competing for time and people's attention,” says Will Dahlberg, general manager of WBHM in Alabama, which laid off four employees last year because of a budget shortfall. One reason for the shortfall was an increase in the fees the station pays to NPR, fees that give the station rights to air shows like “Morning Edition” and “All Things Considered” as well as others that listeners might be getting as podcasts. “The NPR brand helps us, and we pay a lot of money to be with it, but at the same time, it's a rob-Peter-to-pay-Paul situation,” Dahlberg adds. 

The drop in FM’s power and profitability has given new urgency to the need to build a version of the broadcast relationship between stations and the mother ship for the digital age. “A strong network of Member stations makes for a stronger NPR, and vice versa,” NPR’s Director of Subscriptions Growth Leda Marritz said in a statement. NPR offers a content management system to member stations that allows them to share stories. Local reporting appears in the NPR app’s audio feed just as it does on “Morning Edition” and “All Things Considered.” 

Since 2021, NPR has offered a premium subscription for its podcasts, called NPR+. In exchange for a donation to their local station or to NPR, listeners get ad-free downloads and bonus episodes for shows like “Car Talk,” “Fresh Air,” and the NPR Politics Podcast. 

“The goals of it are good. I think in many ways, NPR is late to the game in doing this,” Dahlberg says. He points out that podcasters had been asking for financial support long before 2021. And WBHM isn’t able to offer its members NPR+ because the university that holds its license won’t contract with Stripe, the payments-processor NPR uses. “It’s a hell of a catch-22 for a lot of stations,” Dahlberg says. NPR says it’s working with stations like WBHM to clear some of the red tape, and most NPR+ listeners give through their local station. In markets where a station is part of NPR+, all of the money a subscriber gives goes to their local station. In markets where stations can’t (or don’t) participate, half the money goes to NPR and half goes to a fund the mother ship gives back to stations. In addition, NPR gives local stations NPR+ listeners’ contact information, so the stations can reach out and try to win some of their time or attention. 

Just having some way for digital users to give to public radio is essential, given that “less than 1 percent of NPR’s large digital audience currently donates,” according to Marritz.

Radio isn’t dead yet, however. Early numbers show an uptick in listening since July, a time span that includes two assassination attempts on Donald Trump, the change in the Democratic ticket, both parties’ conventions, and a newly energized, tightening presidential race. And in areas without reliable cellular data, or in times of disasters, radio can be an essential way of reaching people. After Hurricane Helene, Blue Ridge Public Radio in North Carolina broadcast emergency information in English and Spanish, for example.

But the last two years have made clear that, even in times of decline, stations can’t take radio for granted. “We have to get a larger piece of a shrinking pie,” Goldstein says. “We are trained to broadcast and reach broad audiences, but the way that people have developed relationships with media is a lot narrower now.” But the strategy for how to hold onto, grow, and perhaps inspire giving from this audience is, like everything in public media, a joint effort between stations and NPR with no simple or universal answer. 

In an email, NPR Vice President of News Programming Eric Marrapodi hypothesized that a new generation of NPR listeners may find their way to the FM dial once they settle into routines of life like a steady job, family, and commute. The plan outlined in Chapin’s memo, he writes, “is about retaining and reengaging our regular listeners so they listen longer and more frequently.” 

NPR’s audience has traditionally skewed toward older, white, college-educated, affluent listeners. This audience is driving less — a New York Times survey found that white workers with college degrees are more likely to have remote or hybrid jobs — and they’re already well-served by podcasts. “Podcasting is delivering infinite choices to that very same niche audience that NPR is used to catering to,” Montgomery says, and many podcasts have a stronger point of view that resonates with a listener’s own perspective more than NPR’s reporting. When listeners do drive, their cars increasingly connect to their phones instantly, meaning they can keep listening to the podcast or playlist they had on earlier, and may never need to turn to the radio. “You need to change their habits,” Montgomery says. “There's so many talented and amazing journalists at NPR, I'm sure that whatever they're going to put on is quality … but you need to grab people back.”

What stations can offer that’s different from podcasts is reporting from a listener’s own community. “I think we should be leaning into our competitive advantage, which is local and audio,” says a spokesperson for Public Media for All, a collective of public media employees who work with stations to improve diversity, equity, and inclusion within the organizations and to ensure diversity in coverage. And local audio doesn’t just come through the radio — it can be in podcasts or a web stream. “This whole thing of ‘how do we phase out FM slowly enough and the revenue from FM slowly enough that we can survive this digital transformation’ –  all of this is internal stuff that the audience doesn't care about,” the spokesperson continues. “It doesn't matter what platform you're on. All that matters is, are you relevant to the audience?” Some recent projects PMFA highlights as audience-focused and innovative are a welcome guide that St. Louis Public Radio put together for new residents in the city, and “Where Y’all Really From,” a podcast from Louisville Public Media about the experience of Kentuckians with Asian and Pacific Islander heritage

Besides rethinking their audience-loyalty strategy, stations also need to refocus their fundraising plans. The pledge drive is, in many ways, a victim of its own success. For the last two decades, stations have encouraged sustained giving, in which a listener gives a set amount every month rather than  a lump-sum contribution each year. As more members became sustainers (Goldstein says most stations average about half-and-half) the pledge drive became less effective; the people who were likely to give were already giving and didn’t need a reminder to renew. “We have picked the low-hanging fruit, and now we have to get creative with using our air to fundraise, because we need a taller ladder,” Goldstein says. The on-air messaging now has to both convince current donors to increase their monthly donations and appeal to people who either just started listening or who decided against giving during previous pledge drives. Attracting new donors — especially ones who are younger and come from more diverse backgrounds than public radio’s current audience — can sometimes seem like a battle against time, as older members retire (changing their commutes and incomes), drift to other media, or die. “As much as we are trying to engage younger listeners and donors, it's a lot more time and effort and at a slower pace than we are losing folks,” Dahlberg says. 

Reaching this new audience underscores the tension inherent in local and national differentiation. If listeners are just as happy with podcasts, Dahlberg is wondering what WBHM can offer that’s distinct. Soon, WBHM will launch a second station on another frequency aimed at listeners who feel burned out by current events. “I’m calling it a non-news alternative. It may have a mix of, you know, storytelling and music,” Dahlberg says. At first, the station will play a feed provided by PRX through its Remix service, essentially a nonstop playlist of independently produced radio stories. 

On the main WBHM signal, listeners hear expanded regional news, something that isn’t available from national podcasts or via podcast at all in areas where local news has receded. For several years, WBHM has been part of the Gulf States Newsroom, one of several regional collaborations between stations that get support from NPR and CPB, as well as grants from foundations and philanthropists. The stations share editorial resources and aim to provide public-service reporting about areas where local news is at risk of collapsing. “I would say they have done more to reach diverse communities and tell stories from areas in the Southeast than probably more stations have done in their entire existence,” Dahlberg says. In addition to the Gulf States Newsroom, NPR has fostered regional hubs in Texas, California, the Midwest, and Mountain West, and is launching them in New England and Appalachia. “Collaborating regionally … permits individual stations to focus on a more hyperlocal strategy, serving their communities,” says Bruce Auster, managing editor for collaborative journalism at NPR.

While the storm hit every public radio station, some have weathered it better than others, in part through building the kind of loyalty and wide base of revenue that every station is after. KUT in Austin, Texas, has avoided layoffs, even though listenership is down by about a third since 2020 and ratings for its music station, KUTX, are flat. Membership is strong, with 84% of its roughly 30,000 members donating as sustainers, giving an average of $185 a year. 

Digitally, traffic to the KUT site is up over 50% since 2018, drawing 350,000 unique visitors last year. General Manager Debbie Hiott attributes this to the work of 10 new journalists hired since 2019, and treating the site as distinct from the radio signal by updating stories more often, not tying every update to an equivalent story on the radio, and generally not moving “at a broadcast pace” by posting stories only in the morning and afternoon, the times when the station airs its most local news.

Even with this success, the station is facing a 3 percent financial deficit for the fiscal year. Hiott says reserves and leaving some vacant positions unfilled should address the shortfall without the need to let any employees go. For future revenue, she’s looking outside of membership and to major gifts and event sponsorship. The station hosts regular events, including a concert series in a local park with seven events a year (the series has hosted acts like Rosie Flores, promqueen, and the Grammy-winning Black Pumas) and a storytelling show built around a news podcast, ATXplained. Besides building audience, these performances make money. The concerts generate about $200,000 a year in sponsorship. ATXplained brings in $100,000 and is growing. It began in a 300-seat theater in 2018 and in 2023 sold out a 1,200-seat venue. The next event is in a theater that holds 1,600 people. 

Membership has always been public radio’s most important form of support. But as competition increases and as pledge drives weaken, hosting events like these can fill the gap in underwriting or caused by attrition of older members. “It's not going to be the $1,500 underwriting buy from the local dry cleaner that's going to get us through,” Goldstein says, adding that major gifts from donors and philanthropic grants are also becoming increasingly important. “One five-figure gift can replace an entire day of fundraising on the air.” In late 2023, KUT secured $1.5 million from two philanthropists who also supported local schools, the symphony, and arts institutions. Hiott calls the gift “transformative,” and essential to expanding and maintaining regional news coverage. 

One thing Hiott, who previously worked in newspapers, doesn’t want is to abandon the legacy platform too rapidly. “Newspapers pivoted, in a lot of cases, in a way that their core subscribers felt like, ‘Man, I'm getting crap in the paper these days,’” she says. To that end, Hiott is dedicated to securing as much radio audience as possible and steering on-air listeners to digital offerings. This strategy includes putting segments from the podcast Black Austin Matters on-air. It also means putting on newscasts from KUT on KUTX, and inviting listeners who are exhausted by the news to take a break with the music station.

Every station has to figure out how to maintain its current audience and build a new one on-air, in person, and online. But the other lesson Hiott learned from her career in print is that there’s no time to mourn the legacy medium. “What I saw on the newspaper side was a lot of panic at the levels where we should have been more strategic at times, and a lot of insular [thinking like], ‘We're going with this solution, but we're not going to tell you how it works.’ And so I think we have a much better chance of riding this out than, frankly, newspapers had.”