NPR President and CEO Jarl Mohn visited KRWG last week; Samantha Sonner spoke with him about reaching out to millennials to grow the number of NPR listeners.
NPR President and CEO Jarl Mohn says while at an NPR station in Alabama, he heard many stories about why millennials started listening to NPR.
“I asked each of them how they came to listen to NPR,” Mohn said. “And each one of them had a very different story. There was the typical, what we call backseat baby, they grow up and the parents like I did with my kids force them to listen to NPR when they’re in the back of the car. We had those that discovered it and came through it in Podcasts. We had those who came to it because friends had recommended it. And this is just the one little meeting we had in Birmingham. One had just moved to town and was just dialing around trying to find a new favorite radio station, and happened to stumble upon the public radio station.”
Rebekah Baca, President of NMSU’s Broadcasting Club, says she get her news from many different sources, but not in the traditional way.
“I get it all from my phone,” Baca says. “I don’t have regular television so a lot of my stuff comes from the Internet, but my phone is just a really easy place for me to get it all. I can get it from twitter; I can get it from my news app. And I recently downloaded the NPR one app which has been a really great source from me already just in the few days I’ve had it.”
Mohn says by utilizing things like apps and podcasts it can bring in younger listeners.
“So, whether it’s online,” Mohn said. ‘Whether it’s on broadcast, whether it’s on a smartphone. Regardless of whether the device is a tablet, a laptop, a desktop, a radio, we think for what we do, the newsgathering, the storytelling we do. We want to reach the people that like our kind of news and storytelling every possible way.”
Mohn says whether millennials, or any listener, first starts listening to NPR during the election or other major news events, he hopes the engaging content encourages them to stay.
“What I hope we can do when people come in and listen,” Mohn said. “They can hear the kind of storytelling we’re doing. And the quintessential driveway moment that we all know, where you can’t get out of your car, if we have something like that every 20 or 30 minutes. People will start to rediscover, re-fall in love with the type of programming and content we do. My fantasy is that across the entire country, people are sitting in their driveways. I see thousands and thousands of cars sitting in their driveways with the engines running, people listening to NPR because they can’t get out of their car because the next story keeps them in. It’s a wonderful fantasy we’ll see if we can do it.”
