NPR employees tuned in for a pivotal meeting late last year for a long-awaited update on the future of the public radio network.
After many tumultuous months, marked by layoffs, financial turbulence and internal strife, they signed in to Zoom hoping to hear some good news from NPR’s leaders. What they got instead was a stark preview of the continued challenges ahead.
“We are slipping in our ability to impact America, not just in broadcast, but also in the growing world of on-demand audio,” Daphne Kwon, NPR’s chief financial officer, told the group, according to a recording of the meeting obtained by The New York Times.
For the past two weeks, turmoil has engulfed NPR after a senior editor assailed what he described as an extreme liberal bias inside the organization that has bled into its news coverage. The editor, Uri Berliner, said NPR’s leaders had placed race and identity as “paramount in nearly every aspect of the workplace” — at the expense of diverse political viewpoints, and at the risk of losing its audience.
The accusations, leveled in an essay published in an online publication, The Free Press, led to a deluge of criticism from conservatives, including former President Donald Trump, who called for the network’s public funding to be pulled. The essay also generated vociferous pushback internally, with many journalists defending their work and saying Berliner’s essay distorted basic facts about NPR’s coverage.
But NPR’s troubles extend far beyond concerns about its journalism. Internal documents reviewed by The New York Times and interviews with more than two dozen current and former public radio executives show how profoundly the nonprofit is struggling to succeed in the fast-changing media industry. It is grappling with a declining audience and falling revenue — and internal conflict about how to fix it.
NPR’s traditional broadcast audience, still the bulk of its listenership, is in long-term decline that accelerated when the pandemic interrupted long car commutes for millions of people. The network has begun to sign up digital subscribers who pay for ad-free podcasts, but that business has lagged far behind that of its competitors.
While NPR still has an audience of about 42 million who listen every week, many of them digitally, that is down from an estimated 60 million in 2020, according to an internal March audience report, a faster falloff than for broadcast radio, which is also in a long-term decline.
A yearslong push to diversify NPR’s staff, in part to lure listeners beyond its aging and predominantly white audience, hasn’t generated the listenership boost some executives had hoped for. But the effort, which NPR’s former chief executive called its “North Star,” had been a point of contention within the organization long before Berliner published his essay this month.
Making matters more complicated: NPR’s unusual leadership structure. NPR’s reach is the result of its hundreds of member stations around the country, many of which both pay NPR for its shows and produce their own. But the leaders of those member stations — who control NPR’s board — often have conflicting priorities and compete with the network for donors, making changes more difficult.
Together, the challenges raise questions about the long-term vitality of NPR, one of the country’s most storied and far-reaching media organizations. More than 98% of the U.S. population lives within listening range of at least one of the more than 1,000 public radio stations that carry NPR programming, including longtime staples like “Morning Edition” and “All Things Considered.” Legions of die-hard listeners proudly carry tote bags emblazoned with the nonprofit’s three signature letters.
“I believe that public radio has five to seven years to re-imagine itself before it’s simply unsustainable,” said Eric Nuzum, a former NPR executive and co-founder of the audio consulting and production company Magnificent Noise. “And they can’t take two or three years of that time debating a business model.”
An NPR spokesperson, Isabel Lara, said in emails to The New York Times that the organization had confidence in many of its recent initiatives, including its podcast subscription business, its push to diversify its staff and its efforts to reach listeners digitally. Lara said that three of NPR’s podcasts — “Up First,” “Fresh Air” and “Wait Wait … Don’t Tell Me!” — were in Apple’s top-10 subscriber podcasts.
“Our focus on the North Star has led to increased diversity in our content: the voices on the air, the sources our journalists go to, the broader range of topics and issues discussed in our shows,” Lara said. “We want to reach people where they are.”
The organization is now led by Katherine Maher, who started as NPR’s CEO last month after leading the Wikimedia Foundation, which supports the online encyclopedia Wikipedia. Maher had no professional experience in the news industry. In a January news release announcing her hire, NPR’s board said that Maher would help the network “reach audiences on new and existing platforms.”
Maher was criticized this month for social media posts she published before joining NPR, including one from 2018 that called Trump a racist and expressed support for numerous progressive causes, including Black Lives Matter. NPR has said she wrote those posts as a private citizen expressing her free speech rights, and that she oversees the organization’s business, not its editorial product.
In a statement, Maher said that NPR was not alone in facing a challenging media environment and pledged to use its distinctions to its advantage.
“Its differences — as a broadcaster, a nonprofit, a federated network — serve both as unique challenges and remarkable differentiators,” Maher said. “The obstacles we face are real, but the quality of the programming and the integrity of the mission are also indisputable. They offer a strong basis from which to build our future.”
Berliner’s criticism this month of NPR’s North Star strategy hasn’t swayed the network’s leaders. In a statement, NPR said it was committed to a more diverse staff and on-air voices. The network pointed to its large audiences on social media platforms like Instagram, TikTok and YouTube as bright spots.
Many employees also pushed back against the claims in Berliner’s essay, both in public and internally. The staff of “Morning Edition” set aside more than a half-hour of one daily meeting to discuss his remarks.
Bill Siemering, an early leader at NPR who wrote a statement of purposes in 1970 that the nonprofit continues to use, said in an interview that NPR’s mission was as important today as when he first put pen to paper.
“There’s a place in society for a independent source of information that reflects the culture in a meaningful way where all the voices are heard, and where there is intentional programming to help solve some of the most critical problems facing America,” Siemering said.