NPR prides itself on bringing its listeners podcast programming for different tastes and sensibilities. Some bring the biggest news like Up First, NPR News Now, and the recently launched Sources & Methods. There's Book of the Day for the bookish peeps, and Planet Money and Short Wave for the smart and sciency folks.
Collectively, these podcasts promise something to the NPR audience. It's clearly stated on the (relatively new) NPR Podcasts YouTube channel: "We don't only help you understand — we also help you feel understood. Because NPR Podcasts are not just amplifiers — they are also reflections of you: your passions, your perspectives, your neighborhood, your world. More voices. All ears."
For this installment of the News Literacy Edition, our team set out to understand the network's podcasting strategy. Last month we described how NPR's podcasts grew into the current body of work. This month we ask where NPR is going. Our biggest takeaway is that NPR wants to expand the audience for its podcasts and is moving to reach that goal. Why does any of this matter? NPR already raises more in sponsorship money from podcasts than it does from the shows that air on the radio. We want to see how NPR will carry out its public mission as more of its energy gravitates away from the traditional broadcast and toward the podcast and digital audiences that are less familiar with public media.
To explore these questions, we spoke with two NPR vice presidents who guide the podcasting divisions and others. Read on to learn more. — Amaris Castillo
NPR's podcast strategy has two goals: audience growth and audience engagement, said Collin Campbell, NPR's senior vice president, podcasting strategy and franchise development. He asks himself several questions to help define the parameters of the podcast strategy: "How do we grow their (podcasts') audience? How do we get more people to support the show and subscribe to the show? How do we produce the show?"
The goal of this strategy, he said, is to grow the audience by marketing NPR's podcasts to new audiences outside the traditional public radio sphere.
"They may be people that were never members of a public radio station, or never listened to NPR shows before. And so we're looking at how we present who we are to them. How do we describe our shows? How do we interact with those people when they listen to our shows and give us comments or ratings?" he said. "If they really love our show, how do we get them to support our shows — to become subscribers, or to become supporters of NPR+, which is our subscription program for podcasts."
NPR's podcasts were developed with a range of audience needs in mind, according to Campbell. For example, listeners who want all the news they need to know for the day can play Up First, NPR's weekday podcast that highlights the three biggest stories of the day in 10 minutes. He also mentioned the recent launch of How to Do Everything, a podcast from the team of Wait Wait ... Don't Tell Me! "It takes audience questions and answers them in really fun ways, and in ways that deliver some joy and some surprise for the audience," Campbell explained.
In 2022, NPR announced a partnership with YouTube to bring over 20 of its podcasts to the platform. NPR Podcasts' YouTube page is now a hub for some of the network's podcasts, the audio of which gets automatically uploaded onto the streaming platform.
Video podcasts have been amassing large audiences on YouTube for several years. NPR has one such podcast, Wild Card with Rachel Martin, which features Martin interviewing famous guests, asking random existential questions from a deck of cards. "That kind of show is really something that's a very new look for what NPR could be, or even what somebody like Rachel is doing — how we show off Rachel's talents," Campbell explained. "That's an effort. Those things all add up to us presenting NPR to audiences who don't know us, or don't have a strong relationship with the brand." Episodes of the podcast are featured on YouTube and Spotify.
Yolanda Sangweni, NPR's vice president of content and cultural programming, oversees Wild Card, as well as the rest of the network's Arts & Culture Hub, which includes numerous newsletters, radio shows and video series. She said Wild Card has had tremendous success on video-first platforms like YouTube and Spotify. According to Dave Blanchard, Wild Card's supervising editor, the podcast has had 1.3 million views on YouTube since it launched its full video episodes in January 2025. "And that enjoyment is really our audience telling us that this is content that they are seeking and wanting to add to the concierge of all the things that they consume from NPR," Sangweni said.
That's how Sangweni views the Arts & Culture Hub, a suite of offerings that serves NPR's bigger goal of catering to a wider audience. There's Pop Culture Happy Hour for those who want recommendations on good films or TV. Audience members who want a deeper understanding of the intersection of race, culture and politics can listen to Code Switch. There's also Book of the Day, which features conversations with authors and other writers. And It's Been a Minute, which Sangweni describes as a good tool for people who wonder how the way we live influences who we are. "I like to say It's Been a Minute really holds a mirror back to us and just tells us, 'This is who we are.' And sometimes we're not highbrow as a culture. Sometimes we're lowbrow, and that's okay. I think they hold space for all of it."
Sangweni told us that NPR's arts and culture coverage aims to be a unifier: "The stories that we are telling are the stories that really enrich the public. You're looking at film and television, but also dance. The opera. We see that as content that will always inform and enrich the public. And so we would like to double down on continuing to overserve our audience."
On audience engagement, promotion and metrics
When you listen to an NPR station, Campbell said, you often hear a lineup of shows, from Morning Edition to 1A to Fresh Air and All Things Considered. The opposite of that experience for news consumers is selecting and listening to podcasts, he said. The audience "overlap between podcasts across our network is pretty low," he said. "In the podcast space, lots of our listeners just listen to a single show. There aren't very many people who just listen to all and only NPR podcasts. People hop around a lot, and they get their podcasts from lots of different places."
NPR's hope is that, if a listener likes one NPR podcast, they'll want to find another one, and NPR will make it easy for them to do so. "And we want to promote those shows to those people and engage them, so that they go from Up First to Wait Wait ... Don't Tell Me! to Life Kit to Wild Card. That we're offering them the things they need and the people they're interested in, and the topics that they want more of all the time. We've got work to do there."
Campbell said building audience awareness of all of the different podcast options is a complicated process. NPR runs internal promotions, trying to get listeners to jump from one NPR podcast to another, and then dives into the metrics. "For every promo, we watch how many people that promo converts, how many people listen to that promo and then go to that show," he said. "And if those promos perform poorly, we switch them out. We rewrite them, we reproduce them. We look for a better message or a more effective message to get people over."
Kristin Hume, senior director of brand & marketing, said that NPR designs promos that highlight the values of each podcast, or the specific "job" a certain podcast does for a listener. She said that they've had a lot of success with positioning Short Wave as a smart distraction. "Something that people can listen to during their lunch break and wonder about the infinite universe, or the depths of the sea, or an incredible animal species, instead of worrying about politics or what's happening in their job right now," she said in an email. "A place for wonder or curiosity in a jaded world."
Campbell said podcast promotion in places like Spotify and YouTube is difficult, because algorithms and user behavior drive what audiences see. "We're trying to figure out how we get our shows in front of more people in those environments, so that the algorithms pay attention to our network and basically do some of that work for us," he said.
Sangweni said her team is approaching promotion by thinking outside the studio. They may do live events. They're now thinking about how their podcasts can better speak to their audience and meet them. "We're lucky because we have shows like Planet Money internally. We have Wait Wait ... Don't Tell Me! who are already trailblazing in those live events," she said. "Their live events strategies are really something that we're taking learnings from."
Revenue is another measurement of podcast success. Campbell previously told us that podcast revenue started to surpass NPR radio a few years ago and continues to do so.
"Our sponsorship commitments are not disturbed by this moment, I think because we are serving our audience so well around arts and culture," Sangweni said. "Our podcasts are getting an excellent amount of sponsorship, but also we are growing."
On NPR and local stations
Campbell got his start in public radio in 2003 as an associate producer for Morning Edition at WNYC. Now at NPR, he said it's a priority to find ways that the network and the stations can work together. The NPR Network, for example, is a way for NPR to distribute and monetize podcasts at member stations. Ye Gods with Scott Carter, a podcast that explores religious and cultural beliefs, is one example. Produced by Southwest Florida's WGCU Public Media and Efficiency Studios, the podcast is hosted by award-winning executive producer and writer Scott Carter. According to a release, WGCU and the NPR Network plan to have an "always-on" approach to distributing the podcast, publishing 120 episodes over the next three years. One of Campbell's other podcast favorites is Road to Rickwood, where host Roy Wood Jr. explores how Birmingham's civil rights story played out at America's oldest ballpark, was done with stations in Alabama and Louisiana.
"We've done a bunch of these collaborations, where stations are working on a podcast but wouldn't really be able to distribute it very widely or monetize it very well," he said. "And so NPR has put that service in as a kind of network, to do that work for them."
Amy Shumaker, WGCU's associate general manager of content, told us the station's NPR Network partnership is valuable. "We benefit from the promotion and the platform that they provide Ye Gods, and we meet with them regularly to look at how we can maybe better promote something," she said, adding that the podcast has brought in some revenue. Shumaker said that WGCU having a national podcast in collaboration with Scott Carter and NPR gives them an opportunity not just to elevate the station, but to bring great content that can succeed.
On NPR's website, the audience can also find a special series of podcast recommendations from the NPR Network, curated by the NPR One team. "We've always made sure that member stations' podcasts appear in the NPR app," Campbell said, adding that there is also an NPR newsletter called Pod Club with hand-picked recommendations.
"I think the joy of podcasts is that the best ones will be born at the member stations, like they're born out of people who know stories and personalities and reporting from all over the country," Campbell added. "So it's really important for our stations to be able to tell stories in podcasting format, and have producers that can do that kind of work."
NPR's mission is to inform the public, and Campbell says giving people a deeper understanding and appreciation of events and ideas extends to podcasts.
"We have things that speak to your cultural understanding," he said. "We have things that speak to news. We have things that speak to humor and to your soul, hopefully. We're doing the work there that I think NPR has always been dedicated to, and I think we're doing it for tens of millions of people, which is a great feeling. And a lot of these people are the next generation of public media listeners." — Amaris Castillo
The Office of the Public Editor is a team. Reporters Amaris Castillo and Nicole Slaughter Graham and copy editor Merrill Perlman make this newsletter possible. Illustrations are by Carlos Carmonamedina. We are still reading all of your messages on social media and from our inbox. As always, keep them coming.
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