NPR says it’s cutting jobs because of falling ad revenue

Podcasting in the Boom: How NPR is going through a tough time in the advertising and technology world, and why I’m worried about the future

NPR moved this week to cut 10% of their staff and stop production of their acclaimed seasonal podcasts in an effort to close a $30 million budget gap.

On an annual budget of roughly $300 million, Lansing says, revenues are likely to fall short by close to $30 million, although that gap could reach $32 million.

“We’re not seeing signs of a recovery in the advertising market,” Lansing says in an interview. “Nothing is nailed down yet except the principles and what we know we have to reach.”

NPR Chief Operating Officer Will Lee said in an interview that maximizing the value of the content wherever it can reside and wherever the audience demand it is an important strategic priority. “What we’ve shown with podcasting is that we can take some of our core journalistic assets and we can create new formats and new programs around them and actually reach new audiences. And I think we have to extend that lead.”

“I don’t anticipate that it would be like a haircut across every division, because that’s just not management,” Lansing says. Making tough decisions is one of the things management is about.

Lansing, formerly a top television executive for the E.W. Scripps Co., says whenever an economic slowdown appears imminent, marketing budgets get slashed. (On NPR’s radio side, advertising takes the form of underwriting, as corporate sponsors are not permitted to call for listeners to purchase goods or services.)

In the last year, the network booked $134 million in corporate Underwriting, a record built on strong growth in podcasting revenue. Fearing a tepid economy, Lansing and his corporate team projected that revenue would stay flat for the fiscal year that began October 1.

Lansing thought the projection would be impossible in a few weeks. In late November, the network announced $20 million in cuts, including a near-freeze on hiring, elimination of most travel, and suspension of internships.

“We were doing everything we could against the tide and couldn’t keep clipping our costs as the revenue kept slipping,” Lansing says. There was a point where we couldn’t really cut big enough to fill that hole.

Tech companies that rely on advertising are in the midst of layoffs. Amazon, Google, Meta and Microsoft have announced more than 50,000 job cuts combined in just the past few months. Yet the tech and media industries’ prospects stand at odds with a tight labor market and low unemployment more broadly.

When announcing earlier cuts last fall, Lansing said the network would have to do less with less. Now, he says, it must drum up more creative income sources, like the licensing of the popular show How I Built This to Amazon’s streaming services, which he says generates $8 million annually.

“It’s always difficult in these situations, and I don’t want to minimize the impact that it will have on our colleagues and in some cases, you know, our ability to do what we do,” Lee says. It’s really about building a sustainable financial future for NPR, not just for 20 years, but several years out.

Disclosure: This story was reported and written by NPR Media Correspondent David Folkenflik and edited by Acting Chief Business Editor Emily Kopp. Under NPR’s protocol for reporting on itself, no corporate official or news executive reviewed this story before it was posted publicly.

The network also canceled a comedy podcast unveiled just a year ago called Everyone & Their Mom, a spinoff of the mainstay radio program Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me.

A number of NPR staffers have decided to leave the organization. Some familiar voices are among them, including Senior European Correspondent Sylvia Poggioli, who has been with NPR for 41 years. The network did not make any announcements, but let those who were departing decide how to share the news.

NPR’s senior vice president of programming and audience development said that the network has tried to sustain the essential things that will keep them moving forward.

NPR says that the investigative podcast series Embedded, which has appeared irregularly, will become the umbrella under which all of NPR’s investigative and enterprise narratives series will stream. Officials believe that it will become a reliable channel for NPR’s content.

Pat O’Donnell, executive director of the Mid-atlantic division of the guild, told the audience that it had been emotional. The union represents 570 people at NPR, primarily in news and programming. “The financial paperwork and the meetings with SAG-Aftra proved they needed to do something. They had to do something about it. It’s real.”

O’Donnell said the company agreed to improve the package for laid off workers above what was required by the agreement.

It appeared they had a lot of thought behind it. “Nobody will be happy. I think they told us in good faith, that they were going to make this work, and that they carried it out to the best of their ability.