That’s not an accident. “NPR One was really designed to be a way to acquire new audience for public media as a whole, but also for stations,” Tamar Charney, local editorial lead for NPR One, told The Current.
Even though that’s the end goal of NPR One and it has had success so far, internal contention over the app remains. Terrestrial radio stations are not promoting NPR One or podcasts on the air per a new policy formally set by the organization in March. The decision seems to have pros and cons. Considering the positive performance of NPR One, and the expectation that podcasts will draw double the revenue this year, many decried the move as undermining NPR’s digital efforts in favor of the terrestrial. In a RAIN News guest post, Mark Ramsey offered an alternative view of the policy, arguing that the existing radio listeners aren’t the target audience for the content it distributes digitally.
But there is continued stress between the two sides. For instance, when This American Life moved to distribution on Pandora, it sparked a debate among some station managers about whether the action ran counter to the public radio mission. An Indiana station even threatened to remove the show over the alleged conflicts of interest (although it changed course after listener outcry).