Whilst newspapers worry about falling circulation and cable news network viewers are dropping like flies, National Public Radio (NPR) is doing just fine. NPR's has retained its dazzling ratings and has not seen its 'listenership' decrease. In fact, NPR has been able to keep the number of listeners on the rise every year for the past nine years. This past March, NPR revealed that it had an astounding 23.6 million listeners tuning in every week by the end of 2008.

So, what is so special about NPR that makes it seemingly immune to the financial crisis that has caused some newspapers to file for bankruptcy or disappear all together? In an article written by Josh Catone for Mashable.com, a social media website guide, Catone says NPR has "a three-pronged strategy that is helping them not only grow now, but also prepare for the future media landscape."
Like the three letters in National Public Radio's acronym, NPR has three ingredients that spell for success; a dash of local news, a slice of social media and hearty dose of ubiquitous access.

Of course, even NPR has not been entirely immune to economic turbulence. This past December, NPR was obliged to cut 7% of its daily news staff and pull the plug on two shows that proved to be not up to par.

But back to the good news, those three key ingredients, starting with a local focus: according to NPR CEO Vivian Schiller, NPR is incredibly devoted to local coverage. "To me, local is the big play, because local commercial radio has abandoned the local market. Local newspapers are withering or sometimes dying. The big national media companies, including excellent ones like The New York Times, cannot afford to be covering every single community. So that leaves a big, gaping hole to serve Americans' local coverage," she told mediabistro.com in April.

The bottom line? Despite the fact that we live in an increasingly globalized society, delivering and aggregating hyperlocal content is essential to the future of media, as this is a ready made niche for any small media outlet.

Since NPR has grasped the fact that social media is changing the media spectrum, it has embraced social media with open arms. NPR has reaped the benefits of social media tools such as Twitter and Facebook, as well as blogs and podcasts to allow consumers to define what is newsworthy. The NPR Twitter account has close to a million followers, while its Facebook page has just under half a million fans.

What could be considered the most important player in pushing up NPR's ratings and swelling listenership is much owed to the fact that NPR is dedicated to making content readily accessible. Listeners and readers can access NPR on 'their own terms,' tuning in via radio, podcast, through mobile applications, you name it, rather than just online on NPR's website.

Audience participation is critical to the success of social media. NPR has a 'mix your own podcast tool,' which allows listeners to create customized programming schedules based on NPR's archives. In addition, NPR released a content API so that developers can 'remix and reuse' content created within the NPR organization; NPRbackstory attempts to decipher the news behind trending topics by searching through NPR's archives. NPRbackstory automatically generates tweets with linked articles from NPR's archives relating to a specific topic a user may search for.

In order for newspapers assure their place in the future of media, newspapers should follow suit by making their content easily accessible to readers wherever they might want to find it. According to Catone, installing pay walls only drives readers (or in NPR's case, readers and listeners) to seek out lower quality journalism free of charge.] Delivering news, especially local and hyperlocal news, to readers means having the option to use any platform they desire to find coverage on a wide variety of stories.

Source: Mashable.com