Changing with the times

Recognizing that social networking features as key to attracting and retaining a youthful audience, NPR is adding them to its website.

Listeners can create personal profiles containing photos, and list their favorite books, movies, NPR programs, and local stations. Like Facebook and MySpace, they'll be able to declare themselves "friends" with other users, including NPR staffers.

The station is also expanding its API library so local radio stations, and ordinary people, can incorporate its content into their own applications. One tool plots the subjects of NPR stories on a world map. Another lets people listen to stories on iPhone.

NPR also plans to increase the flexibility of its podcast downloads, which have tripled in use over the past two years.

The initiatives will both further its goal of spreading information worldwide, and draw in younger audiences — which represent the future for fundraising at NPR's member stations, writes the Associated Press.

And the efforts did not come without a fight. Online content integration was a source of tension between NPR's management, board of directors and other radio stations, noted former NPR Exec and Ombudsman Jeffrey Dvorkin in a blog post.

"Managers who ignore the reality that at NPR, the customers (the stations) own the company, do so at their peril," he claimed.

As a case in point, CEO Ken Stern left NPR in March after a series of moves to expand the media company's online presence without awaiting the blessing of member stations.

Still, the initiatives appear to be working. NPR.org had 2.6 million unique visitors in August, a 78 percent increase from a year earlier, according to comScore data.

Public radio audiences and contributions went up, too, albeit on a smaller scale. NPR stations drew 31.3 million weekly listeners in spring 2008, a three percent increase from spring '07.