October 10, 2017
While NPR continues to dominate and grow its podcasting business, it doesn’t look as though it is forsaking its terrestrial station base. Last week Jarl Mohn, President and CEO of NPR laid out a declaration that should alarm many of America’s commercial news/talk stations in PPM markets.
Mohn’s goal is to have NPR’s News/Talk stations outperform commercial News/Talkers in all 50 PPM markets. NPR stations are well on their way as the leading radio news source in 20 of the 50 or so Nielsen PPM markets according to NPR..
In those 20 markets, NPR has more weekly cume listeners than their commercial news/talk competitors. If I were doing this in speech form, I would stop and repeat that sentence.
When I was in Montreal in the spring, I found myself listening to Vermont Public Radio quite a bit, as well as CBC Radio One. I found the information presented on both stations to be informative and timely. I did not notice a lot of political bias.
In contrast, commercial radio’s local “news-talk” station was busy informing the public by playing phone in trivia games in-between constant commercial breaks.
Tuh, I used to donate to the jazz NPR station in Seattle until their ridiculous political bias drove me away. And CBC AM’s sheer hatred of all things conservative scared me off about the same time!