NPR’s Tempest In An Artisanal Tea Kettle – What Retailers Can Learn From It  

For those looking for rare events this week, the Internet has a sight not often viewable to the general public: The Towering Rage Of Public Radio Fans.

Generally, a tribe of peaceful, tote-bag loving sorts who rarely anger unless their neighbors fail to properly recycle, this week the brotherhood of NPR fans have hit their breaking point. They’re as mad as the non-denominational negative afterlife that they may or may not believe in (and respect your choices around either way) — and they are not going to take it anymore

So what has NPR done?

Is “Wait, Wait… Don’t Tell Me!” out of punny news-related limericks?

No.

Has Terry Gross gone mute?

Nope, she’s fine.

Did Garrison Keillor drown in Lake Wobegone?

Tragically no, he’s also fine and we’re all stuck with “A Prairie Home Companion” until our sun collapses.

No, alas, NPR did something considerably less flashy — and perhaps something no one would have noticed at all had they chosen not to enshrine the practice by publishing it in their ethics rule: They have banned their on-air personalities from promoting their digital content (podcasts, digitized versions of the NPR, PRX, PRI shows we all know and love like “Morning Edition,” “All Things Considered,” etc.) on air.

According to a statement released by Chris Turpin, NPR’s VP for news programming and operations:

“We won’t tell people to actively download a podcast or where to find them. No mentions of npr.org, iTunes, Stitcher, NPR One, etc.”

GOOD:

“That’s Linda Holmes of NPR’s “Pop Culture Happy Hour” podcast and our blogger on the same subject and Bob Mondello, NPR’s film critic. Thanks so much.”

BAD:

“OK, everyone. You can download Alt.Latino from iTunes and, of course, via the NPR One app.”

Wait, huh? Why would they do that, given how incredibly popular their digital content is and how natural a fit for the people who are already listening NPR are for promoting even more panpipe accompanied news reports?

“We do mention podcasts on air, but people know how to find podcasts so we don’t need to get into the technical details of how to download them,” NPR spokesperson Isabel Lara told Quartz in an email. “We continue to work with our member stations to fully realize a complete local/national listening experience on NPR One. Until then, we’ve decided not to promote on air.”

While she makes a valid point, it is hard to imagine there are people out there who would be listening to NPR One if only Steve Inskeep would tell them how; it is certainly not an answer that most are accepting of. Countless editorial, article and headline have captured the sentiment: NPR is making a bad decision because they are trying too hard to prop up an old analog broadcast system it no longer truly needs.

And those were the professionals. The armchair social critics on Twitter were somewhat less kind, boasting claims such as the following:

“Ethical” decisions like this will kill @npr.

“JUSTICE FOR NPR PODCASTS”

NPR continues to live in the Dark Ages! Wake up!

So, is Joshua Benton at Nieman Lab right? Has NPR effectively shot itself in the foot here?

Well, maybe think about it again.

Those Local Affiliates — And Why They Matter More Than Anyone Understands

Ahhh, local stations. The rub, the backbone of the system and, until about 15 years ago, the way NPR — the Washington D.C. based news institution that is with the “big” NPR content that we all know and love — distributed all that beloved content.

And those station general managers who make up NPR’s governing board, notes Benton, have no reason to love the digital content since it makes them a whole lot less relevant.

“Stations hate the idea of listeners trading in their local loyalty for a direct-from-NPR experience. Of those 900 or so member stations, there are maybe a few dozen who generate really significant local content. Most are just vectors for the distribution of “Morning Edition,” “All Things Considered,” “Car Talk,” “This American Life,” and so on … NPR One goes out of its way to encourage localization and bring in local station content and branding,” notes Benton.

The beholdenness to those stations, Benton thinks, is causing NPR to put a strategy tax on its digital properties. A strategy tax is anything that makes a product less likely to succeed, yet is included to further larger corporate goals.

But perhaps Benton misses two things about that NPR affiliate system — and they are two important things that are getting lost in this discussion.

The first is that while most of those stations usually don’t produce content that is “significant,” they exist as a standing network of embedded reporters that NPR does not have to pay (in fact, those reporters’ stations pay NPR to broadcast their programming) and are available with background the minute any story, anywhere in the United States drops.

A simple example that the PYMNTS staff has direct experience with: When Sarah Palin was named John McCain’s running mate. Most new outlets spent the morning running the following headline “What, who is that?” But not NPR, which has 35 staffed news stations in the APRN (Alaska Public Radio Network), who, starting at 4 AM EST, were able to run with anything and everything anyone ever wanted to know about their governor, Sarah Palin.

NPR has repeated that trick many, many times with political coverage, natural disaster coverage and visiting dignitary coverage. The station rarely has to send a reporter, because they almost always have one on site, who will not only feed them free content, but will be incredibly excited to do so.

Which leads to the second big advantage of the NPR affiliate network, which is that it also functions as National Public Radio’s (and its affiliated entities in public media) farm team from which they draw their national talent. Ever wonder why all NPR reports sound incredibly similar, right on down to the “NPR voice” they all speak in? That is a farm team at work. National NPR reporters almost entirely started at NPR local affiliates and (through getting enough of their work into the national NPR system) went on to work their way up organizationally.

NPR does not pay for that training — and that training is important because the “NPR brand” is a very specific quality that listeners refer to. Massive damage to that affiliate network damages that farm team, which in the long run hurts all their programming and content (even if it is in the preferred digital delivery method).

So Why Should A Retailer Care?

Most retailers are not trying to sell news stories that sound like they were meant to be delivered at a poetry slam, so perhaps it seems there is little to be gleaned here.

And yet we think there is a lesson to be learned in the “digital is the future” enthusiasm that pervades everything — commerce, entertainment, news programming — that tends to tip over into a sort of “It’s physical and real world? Kill it with fire, it no longer matters,” hysteria.

NPR (like the nation’s physical retailers) has a lot of redefining to do when it comes to their analogy affiliates and the centralized brand’s digital future. However, simply assuming that allowing the physical locations to die of irrelevance, or to cull them at all costs, is the same thing as finding a redefined solution is naive. Simply letting digital eat analog isn’t a smart move for NPR, because even if they don’t need the stations to be their signals — or even primary — repeater, doesn’t mean they don’t still need the stations.

They may need fewer, and they may need those stations to contribute different things going forward — but simply saying they don’t need them and acting to preserve them is stupidly shooting themselves in the foot, betrays a terrible lack of understanding of how the NPR system works in specific, and what the benefits of physical ubiquity are generally.

Walmart has a lot of catching up to do digitally, but at the end of the day consumers who need it right now run very good odds going to Walmart. Because, for 90 percent of Americans, there is a Walmart within 15 minutes of them.

So before you light your ethically sourced wood torch and join the bandwagon booing NPR this week, remember that the goal of any business (be it retail or news radio) isn’t just to advance today — it is to build a system that will keep advancing going forward.