Will NPR Save the News?

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New CEO Vivian Schiller in NPR's New York Studio | Photograph by Julian Dufort

New-media pundits, such as Buzzmachine's Jeff Jarvis, author of What Would Google Do?, applaud NPR's catholic approach. "It's got very smart people thinking about its online strategy," Jarvis says. "Like the BBC, it sees itself as a public trust, so its aim is to get its content distributed as widely as possible. Old media expected us to come to them. Now they need to come to us." Multiplatform distribution dovetails nicely with NPR's public-service mission, and -- significantly -- helps attract a younger audience too: NPR's median radio listener is 49; its median podcast listener is 33.

New technology may be the key to NPR's future success, but it also represents a significant threat to its current revenue model. Like many families, NPR and its member stations are fighting about money. Public radio has a highly collaborative structure that inverts that of most commercial media. The nation's public-broadcasting stations pooled their resources to start National Public Radio in 1970, and they still control its board.NPR doesn't broadcast, but produces Morning Edition, All Things Considered, and several other shows and sends them to local stations where they're blended with regional coverage and shows produced elsewhere, such as Fresh Air from WHYY in Philadelphia. Forty-three percent of NPR's budget comes from the dues and fees member stations send in for those rebroadcast rights, prorated by audience -- $1.4 million a year from L.A.'s KCRW, for example. Twenty-nine percent comes from corporate underwriting (the 10-second spots that stand in for ads) and another 15% from foundations and grants, less than 2% of which is government money. That means the money you send in to your local station's pledge drive really is the biggest piece of the pie.

By offering its content online, however, NPR effectively becomes a competitor to its member stations, undercutting the exclusive broadcast rights they pay for. Paul Farhi, who covers public media for The Washington Post, explains, "If I'm running a station in Chapel Hill or Bloomington, I pay dues to NPR to get the marquee programming that brings people to my station -- All Things Considered and Morning Edition. I don't care about your digital initiative, or your All Songs Considered [primarily a podcast] -- you're siphoning my dues to build your national brand. That's the essence of the conflict." For now, audio streams of the tent-pole programs are posted on NPR.org with a time delay and are not offered as podcasts, a compromise that satisfies no one.

It was Schiller's predecessor, Ken Stern, who oversaw the aggressive move into live streaming and podcasting, making member stations unhappy enough to push him out last year. Many insiders say Schiller was chosen in part for her diplomatic skills on this very issue. Indeed, she tells me she doesn't see conflict in NPR's digital divide, but rather an "enormous opportunity ... to build the future of media in partnership with those stations." Her challenge, she says, is to "figure out a way to work together so that people in every community who go to their local NPR-member-station sites can get the benefit of NPR's international, national, and local coverage in a seamless experience."

Not so fast, says Ruth Seymour, who has been at KCRW in Los Angeles since the early 1970s and is now the general manager. "There is a hope on NPR's part that somehow we can work collaboratively online. I am truly dubious about it. In online, everybody is competitive with everybody else. You are not limited anymore by your coverage area." KCRW, for example, is known for the indie- and world-music show Morning Becomes Eclectic, which is streamed online, placing kcrw.com in direct competition with a new national site, npr.org/music. The latter features lots of video content, streams of live concerts, and exclusive "First Listens" of albums from artists ranging from Bruce Springsteen to Animal Collective. It also works with 12 partner stations around the country -- emphatically not including KCRW. "This is our turf," Seymour says. "We happen to be in a market that is a capital for the entertainment business. I don't know how you can be connected in Washington. The business isn't there."