NPR has begun making strategic changes to its newsmagazines in an attempt to reverse a trend in audience loss.
Among the changes it’s making on its flagship programs Morning Edition and All Things Considered are including more stories in the 2- to 3-minute range, featuring a broader range of topics and shifting to a livelier and more conversational presentation style.
“[W]hat we’re hearing loud and clear from our broadcast audience is they want a broader mix of shorter and livelier stories, that are personally relevant, and delivered with an approachable conversational style,” Edith Chapin, SVP, editor-in-chief and acting CCO, said in an email to staff last month obtained by Current. She noted that the shows will include fewer scripted two-ways — interviews between a host and a reporter — and that each hour of Morning Edition and ATC will feature no more than one element longer than five minutes.
“The change is not going to dramatically reduce the overall number but it’s making us focus critically and ask: ‘does this earn every minute?’” Eric Marrapodi, VP for news programming, told Current in an email.
More than two-thirds of NPR’s broadcast audience is over 45, but only the over-65 portion has seen growth in the last five years, Chapin said. So NPR has begun “actively targeting” the 40–64 age group with these changes.
“Among people who listen to the radio, this is where we think we can have the most positive impact — it’s a sizable audience that we need to better serve,” Chapin wrote.
While NPR is focused on broadcast audiences, the network will also “address tactics for podcasts and digital in the months ahead, and our approach there will also be targeted to serve the audiences who use each platform,” Chapin wrote.
NPR is also embedding Holly Morris, who works on NPR’s training team and writes the NPR News Quiz, into its newsroom through the end of the year to “help us ratchet up our ‘joy’ quotient across platforms,” wrote Eva Rodriguez, VP and executive editor, in an email to staff obtained by Current. “Think of Holly as our Joy Czar.” “Joy” and “wonder” were among the areas NPR’s audience wanted to see more of, along with personal finance, space and science, and health and wellness, Chapin said.
The emphasis on these areas won’t cut into political coverage, Marrapodi said in an interview.
“We have lots of resources assigned to covering politics and covering the election,” he said. “That’s a huge story. I think we’re well-resourced there. But the audience is telling us that’s not the only thing they want to hear about. … We’re being really cognizant to make sure we’re hitting the politics in an appropriate way to give the audience what they need to know. And also giving them other things that give that surprise, that joy, that delight, that wonder that they’ve come to expect from NPR.”
NPR learned through research that its audience sees it as “a little too formal or a little too academic,” Marrapodi said.
“Sometimes in news, we can fall into being very buttoned-up, especially when we’re covering serious topics,” Marrapodi said. “And the audience expects that from us, to be serious, but I think they’re giving us some permission to experiment a little more and to be a little more casual in those spaces.”
With the changes, NPR is attempting to bolster average-quarter hour listening, which measures average listening within 15-minute intervals. It decided to focus on AQH instead of cume because “cumulative audience is a hard thing to control,” Marrapodi said.
“I always like to tell my teams, ‘Control what you can control,’” he said. “You’re not always going to be able to control when somebody tunes in, but you have a better shot at keeping them listening longer. And that’s something you can control by how lively your broadcast is, how interesting, how personally relevant it is.”
The changes coincide with the fall ratings book, which began earlier this month, Marrapodi said.
Limiting segments over five minutes to only one per hour is one way he thinks NPR can bolster AQH. Before the change, stories and interviews that ran longer than five minutes amounted to about 25% of the newsmagazines’ content, he said, and multiple longer pieces often appeared within a single hour. “Being intentional and spreading them out” could help with listening, he said.
NPR saw annual declines in its weekly broadcast audience from 2017 to 2022, according to a Pew Research report released last year. The total decline was about 22%, according to Pew.
However, the network saw an “encouraging bump” in its most recent audience data in August, according to spokesperson Isabel Lara. The data shows “a big increase in audience” for newsmags and on digital and podcasts “thanks to the recent news cycle,” she said.
“We saw big losses in AQH and in cume, as lots of people did, and we said … the audience is telling us we can’t keep doing what we’re doing,” Marrapodi said. “It’s not working for them, and we’ve got to make some changes.”
“Are we going to do this forever? I don’t know,” he said. “We need to see how the audience responds, and we need to be nimble and flexible.”
Station reactions
Station PDs that Current reached out to generally reacted positively to the changes.
Ron Jones, PD of KCUR in Kansas City, Mo., said he applauds “the new direction” and looks forward to seeing “where it takes us.”
“While both Morning Edition and ATC have been the drivers of the public radio audience for more than 40+ years, their style and format have not changed as much as listener behavior has evolved,” he said in an email to Current. “During the pandemic I realized that it’s time for new thinking and execution without compromising the commitment to quality journalism.”
At WAMC in Albany, N.Y., PD Tina Renick called the changes “a good move” but cautioned against ignoring other audience segments.
“I don’t think they should forget about their ‘future audience,’” she said in an email. “Maybe the younger crowd grew up with more ways to consume audio and are not listening as much, or at all, to radio, but we have to hang on to the hope they will come to know and admire the simplicity of radio.”
NPR’s focus on targeting the 40–64 age group is “welcome,” as it “aligns more closely with the demographics of our local audience,” said Doug Nadvornick, PD at Spokane Public Radio in Washington, in an email.
“I also welcome any attempt to reduce NPR’s heavy emphasis on wonky political process and ‘insider’ coverage that gets so tiresome day after day,” he added.
NPR’s Marrapodi also highlighted the need to utilize station reporters more, which he thinks can help with the effort to liven up broadcasts.
“We’ve got people on the ground, and we need to be demonstrating that and showing their expertise and showing them where they are so the audience has a better understanding of that,” he said. “That’s a real distinction point for our coverage and our journalism.”
Conversations with stations have also spurred more “granular” changes on the newsmagazines over the last year and a half, Marrapodi said. For instance, national hosts have been forward-promoting within segments to try to hold the audience to the end of the segment and pass them to local hosts, he said.
Tactics like that “have been something we’ve really worked hard on with the stations, and they’re not shy about telling you when we’re getting it right and when we need to do better,” he said.
Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly said that Chapin wrote the email about Morris. Rodriguez wrote the email.