National Public Radio - Listenership

Listenership

According to a 2009 Washington Post article, about 20.9 million listeners tune in to NPR each week. The average listener is 49 years old,and earns an annual household income (HHI) of US$93,000. As of 2006, NPR's listenership is 80% white and 20% non-white. While Arbitron tracks public radio listenership, they do not include public radio in their published rankings of radio stations.

NPR stations generally do not subscribe to the Arbitron rating service, and are not included in published ratings and rankings such as Radio & Records. However, NPR station listenership is measured by Arbitron in both Diary and PPM (people meter) markets. NPR stations are frequently not included in "summary level" diary data used by most advertising agencies for media planning. Data on NPR listening can be accessed using "respondent level" diary data. Additionally, all radio stations (public and commercial) are treated equally within the PPM data sets making NPR station listenership data much more widely available to the media planning community. According to Artitron's National Broadcast Audience Estimate report for September 29, 2011, NPR's signature morning news program, "Morning Edition", is the network's most popular program, drawing 12.9 million listeners a week, with its afternoon newsmagazine, "All Things Considered", a close second, with 12.2 million listeners a week. Arbitron data is also provided by Radio Research Consortium, a non-profit corporation which subscribes to the Aribtron service and distributes the data to NPR and other non-commercial stations and on its website. In a Harris telephone survey conducted in 2005, NPR was the most trusted news source in the U.S.