Honors Theses (Journalism and Communication)

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NPR Purposes Revisited: Economic Pressures and the Mission of National Public Radio in the 21st Century
(2008-06) Seymour, William Donald
This paper examines the developments in National Public Radio to determine if the network is fulfilling its original mission in the present day. It is an opportune time to examine NPR' s current mission because it is facing several new challenges. National Public Radio has had to adjust to the emergence of rival distribution networks such as American Public Media and Public Radio International. NPR is coming to terms with the fact that its audience is aging and is only slowly becoming more diverse. Public radio knows these things about itself because it has commissioned extensive audience research over the last two decades. This research in one major source of information for this paper, but I also made broad analyses of a few public radio programs as well as interviewed several industry professionals. By drawing on these sources, I conclude that National Public Radio is incapable of executing its full vision in today's radio market. NPR is unable to be a broadly based diverse service because it is forced to specialize in news programming in order to maintain a loyal audience that will continue to fund the network.