NPR President and CEO Jarl Mohn visited KRWG this week and spoke with Samantha Sonner about NPR’s place in journalism and ways public media can continue to grow.
Jarl Mohn joined NPR in 2014 and is working toward visiting as many stations as possible across the country.
“I want to see what’s happening,” Mohn said. “A lot of my predecessors and folks that work for NPR, it’s easy just to be spending our time in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and that’s an important part of the picture but it’s not a complete part of the picture. We think the real strength of National Public Radio and NPR is the service across the entire country, service to communities, large, medium, small.”
Before becoming President and CEO of NPR, Mohn served on the board of trustees of Southern California Public Radio for more than a decade, held leadership positions at E! Entertainment Television, MTV, and VH1, and worked as a radio disk jockey. Mohn says there are lessons from commercial media that NPR can use to continue to grow.
“I think there are a lot of principals that commercial broadcast, commercial radio has used that have not been used in public radio,” Mohn said. “We need to let people know what we’re doing, for instance we need to promote better. We have this wonderful product, and we’re not talking about changing the product, changing the service, changing what we’re doing. We want to do a better job at being able to communicate and reach out to people and let them know that we’re here.”
Mohn says they are using the new platforms and technology available to grow the audience.
“We’re having record levels of listenership,” Mohn said. “We’re up 38% year over year from last year. We’re getting younger people, younger meaning 25 to 34. That’s young for us. Nice increases there. The growth in podcasting has been phenomenal, 62 million downloads, and on npr.org 40 million uniques in the month of September. So, on every platform, almost every offering that we have, we’re seeing really significant growth.”
Mohn says NPR as an important role to play in journalism.
“Journalism is at risk in the United States, certainly around the world,” Mohn said. “The economics of journalism are difficult, and that’s why having a listener supported organization locally and nationally is usually important, we’re one of the few organizations that can invest in international journalism. We also think this network that we have with 264 member stations provides a real strategic advantage. There aren’t any other news organizations in the United States that have that kind of reach.”
