How NPR is thinking about podcasts in 2024

Today, I have a preview of an interview with NPR’s new podcasting chief, Collin Campbell. Campbell, who is an alum of WNYC and Southern California Public Radio, was appointed to lead podcast strategy after a tough year for the network that saw the cancellation of several podcasts and more than 100 people laid off. He is no stranger to industry tumult — he previously led new show development at Gimlet (RIP). I talked to him a bit about how NPR plans to rebuild and what success looks like in the new podcasting landscape.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

After all the cancellations and layoffs last spring, NPR was really emphasizing a “broadcast-to-podcast” strategy. And this is something you’ve heard repeatedly, including at other places like WNYC, that podcasting is obviously not going away, but it also, ideally, has a broadcast presence as well. Is that still a guiding principle as you’re moving forward?

NPR is an anomaly in that, right? That’s a very special lane that we occupy. We can run a media company in ways that almost everybody else in podcasting can’t. So I think you’re foolish to not have a strategy that plays in all those places.

But I think the better example is, if you look at the December data for Podtrac, NPR News Now is the top podcast in the country. There are a lot of reasons for how it got there. If you look at NPR News Now, it’s one of the first things you’re going to hear in Alexa, one of the first things you’re going to hear on the NPR news app, and there’s an enormous number of people that just subscribe to it and play it all day because they want a news update when they want to get one. So that’s becoming a product that’s not a broadcast product anymore. It’s becoming something that people are super habitualized to.

I don’t want to sound too much like a product person — I’m an editorial person. But as a product, I think that’s a really fascinating study. It’s something that serves a lot of people in a lot of places, and some of those audiences now are bigger than they ever would be in broadcast.

NPR News Now is an example of a news podcast doing really well. And I think we’ve seen the durability of daily news podcasts. But in the podcast industry, everyone’s really concerned about what’s going to happen to seasonal narrative shows in this new landscape. Where do you see those shows functioning within NPR’s strategy? And I mean, specifically, standalone podcasts. I don’t mean shows that already have some syndication.

NPR is still a place that’s going to, even in a really difficult year, spend $300 million on content. So there’s a constant flow of ideas and pitches and people coming in saying, “I have the scoop,” “I have this thing,” or “I’m noticing this strange trend.” So the question is, how do we distribute this, how do we package it? I’m trying to build inside the organization a larger narrative unit for that to be able to jump on those ideas and be really creative with how we tell those stories.

There are two things that feel most relevant to me. There’s Embedded, which has always showcased limited series and what I think you and I would call longform narrative podcasting. And we’re working on a series now — I don’t think we’ve talked about this, I think it’s okay — but we’re doing something with Meribah Knight from Nashville Public Radio who did The Kids of Rutherford County and The Promise. She is a super gifted storyteller and a public radio person, and she is working with the Embedded team to do a short-run series with her about the Tennessee legislature. She’s a creative force that I want to see be able to live on in podcasting and to have an outlet and have editors and producers who can collaborate with her to tell that story. And we’ll put that out and like whatever shape it takes.

Embedded is commissioning future seasons, and we have a big budget line committed to that, and we have a really gifted crew of people who’ve been making that show for a while. So that, as a commitment inside NPR, lives on. It’s not as robust as I’d like it to be. But it’s an important piece of the stories we’re going to tell.

One thing that Anya Grundmann mentioned that really struck me when I spoke with her last year was that a show needs to have 5 million impressions to be considered a success. That’s not necessarily downloads; that could be impressions over broadcast social media. But that struck me as pretty high. Is that still kind of a floor expectation for how a show should perform? Or is there no wiggle room?

No. I don’t think I’ve been here long enough to model out a number, but that seems far gone for me. You know the space, even, I think, since you and Anya talked, has gotten more crowded. It’s a very hard place to go through. I think NPR has a lot more advantages than lots of other places to cut through there. We’re in a really good position to be able to support new work and launch new work, but it’s really hard for me to set expectations on where that goes.

I think we’re also all aware that sponsorship, revenue, and CPMs have taken a hit, and how you model revenue right now feels really difficult — how much you can charge for sponsorships, how you model that audience, where it goes. I think a lot of us who work in development and strategy are flying a little blind right now. I’m happier to be in a place that has a stronger sense of itself and its mission. Some of the things that we’re doing, we’re not doing explicitly because we think we can make our money back right away on sponsorships. We have an obligation to keep NPR healthy and to show the revenue potential, but I think it’s a very hard moment to set those numbers and feel like you can do that as arithmetic. I think it looks more like calculus right now.