Soundscapes: The Evolution and Challenges of National Public Radio

If only the order in which radio and television had been invented and exploited had been reversed, so that there had first been television and then, bursting out in the second half of the 20th century, radio! How delighted and entranced and overwhelmed we would all be by radio! and we would say, “What a marvelous thing it is, you can get the programs and you don’t have to watch it!”

—Peter Goldmark

While radio had existed as a medium of mass communication for nearly half a century, the arrival of National Public Radio programming to the U.S. airwaves in 1971 marked the beginning of an era of radio broadcasting that would provide American and international listeners with unprecedented, enriched access to information.

Today, NPR produces more than 130 hours of weekly programming, including 34 original shows, distributed and broadcast via satellite through 810 member stations in the 50 states, the District of Columbia, Guam and Puerto Rico. An average weekly national audience of 26 million people listens to NPR. Its signature show, All Things Considered, is second only to Morning Edition—also an NPR staple—as the most listened-to program on public radio.

Much of NPR’s programming is available on the Internet via its web site and a highly successful venture into podcasting begun just a year ago. Sirius satellite radio’s five million subscribers can listen to two NPR stations. NPR broadcasts in 147 countries and, while other major U.S. media have reduced their global presence in recent years, NPR has expanded its number of foreign correspondents and bureaus. August 2006 saw the opening of its seventeenth international bureau, matching the number the Washington Post now operates abroad.

Aiming to be both innovative in terms of its programming and aggressive in disseminating content, NPR’s combination of editorial consistency and rigorous revenue management have helped the organization hold its own against commercial and noncommercial competitors as well as today’s dominant medium—television.

“We all know the images that television presents are phenomenally powerful,” says Kevin Klose, NPR’s President and CEO. “Those images are repeated many, many times, and they hardly ever lose their sense of power or immediacy, and that’s a visual reality. But precisely because we cannot use a camera—a camera is an observer and is, to some extent, inert—radio can be extremely inquisitive and probing in ways that television cannot.”

Alongside its effectiveness, Klose also takes pride in NPR’s funding formula, which includes member-station pledge drives, private foundation sponsorship and corporate underwriting. “Nobody is funded the way we are in this country,” he says. “The idea of something that is voluntarily funded delivering such wide-ranging and powerful service to millions of Americans is a great statement about the power of public radio.”

Written by: Hal Klopper often writes about the intersection of social, religious and political issues. His story “Nonfinito” is forthcoming in The Long Meanwhile, a literary anthology (Hourglass Books). He lives in Brooklyn and is working on a novel, West of the Equator..