11 Resources for NPR

Audience development on digital used to be a crap shoot. Stations would try something to see what sticks. These days, it is possible to be much more sophisticated about growing audience on digital. In this session, we’ll hear from stations that are having above-average success and figure out what they are doing right. You’ll see examples from stations that lead in overall growth, audience engagement, and on-demand usage based on a blind data sort by NPR Digital Services. One of the key threads that runs through each example is the importance of good content management and strategic focus. And the lessons learned will be applicable to stations of all sizes. Be prepared to get valuable tips you can take back to your station.

Reversing a years long trend, public radio news stations have been growing though most of 2016. All that, and peak election listening is still ahead of us if we adopt audience building as an on-going practice.  The Spark project helped set a new normal for promotion, and there’s more to be done to keep the hard won gains, while applying what we’ve learned across platforms.  NPR and stations will discuss some of those lessons, opportunities for sustaining listening through the election and beyond, and what's involved in creating a new culture of optimism.

Editors make or break your stories. They can also be teachers, innovators, and even visionaries. Without good editors, newsrooms lose relevance, creativity, staff and audience. In other words, editors are the future of your stations and our network. And yet, public radio - and journalism at-large -- has not done enough to invest in editing. How can we find, cultivate and retain editors who can shape not only daily coverage but public radio’s future sound(s)? And how should we define the craft of editing in 2016 -- when our industry is changing so rapidly?

Nearly a year ago, the public radio system jumped headfirst into a brave new world: new NPR show clocks that upended decades of comfort and complacency. What have we learned in this first year? How can we best insert vibrant local content seamlessly into the national show? And how can stations of all sizes maximize flexibility to put their strongest content on the air when the length of that content might change from day to day?

We know about the changing demographic of the United States and that many groups, including Asian, Pan-Asian, African-American, and Latinos are all underrepresented in public media today.  We also tend to attract more highly educated middle and upper class audiences and staffs. The industry is working to diversify staff and content focus.  Yet, we often are puzzled why things don’t change more quickly, despite our earnest efforts. 

Arts and culture coverage has been an essential part of public radio and the source of many ‘driveway’ moments. However, in the past few years, the transition of many stations to "all news" formats has caused many to wonder whether we have lost touch with this important element of the story.