Radio was supposed to be gone by now–wiped out by iPods, on-demand streaming and an endless buffet of personalization options. But the digital wave doesn’t always break the way people predict, and it turns out that National Public Radio’s audience has grown through the Web era: It now attracts a record 28 million listeners a week.

There’s still plenty for CEO Vivian Schiller to worry about, though. Like how to hoover up the donations that power her nonprofit in a recession. Or how to cover international news when it’s increasingly risky to do so.

But this isn’t Schiller’s first time at a media company facing big challenges. Her last gig was at the New York Times, where she ran the publisher’s flagship Web site.

Liveblog

Prior to Schiller’s appearance, we’re treated to a gag reel: Your favorite NPR personalities trying out inappropriate digital memes: A Karl Cassell iPhone app, Scott Simon in a motion-capture suit, etc. Good stuff.

Kara: Before we get to your current job, tell us about your old gigs.

Schiller: Walks through bio: NYT.com, cable, Russian interpreter, etc.

Kara: Okay, back to radio. Where are you?

Schiller: First of all, note we don’t call ourselves National Public Radio anymore. We’re NPR. That said, we’re still growing our radio audience. We have 34 million listeners a week. But our job is to inform citizens, via universal access. That used to mean radio, but we don’t think we should be limited to that anymore.

Schiller: This wasn’t done in response to declining audience, by the way. We just wanted to reach more people, on more platforms. We want to make it as widely available as possible. So all our RSS feeds are full-text. And we’ve got a very robust API, etc., which allows us to do cool things like the iPad app, which we made very quickly. And an Android app, which a developer built on his own. We just made the code for his app totally public.

We get over a billion requests on our API. Very few media organizations can say that. So we’ll see more cool stuff. Like combining NPR stories with information from local stations and creating “news products” that track trends, like the oil spill or the flu epidemic. “We don’t know what could be created, but we know things will be.”

10:43 am: Kara–How hard is it to change a radio organization into a multimedia organization?

10:44 am: Schiller–Within NPR, they were already starting to do it when I came on board. You don’t want to force people into it. You let early adopters show the way. There were concerns that we were taking resources away from traditional radio to go into digital, which was not the case. We put all 300 journalists into a digital training course, though.

10:46 am: Schiller–Outside of NPR, at the affiliates, it was a different story. Some smaller affiliates weren’t really set up for digital, so we had to provide tools for them so they could be part of the process. Some of this was tools for photos, etc. But fundamentally, helping them deliver audio streams. Radio towers are going away within 10 years, and Internet radio will take its place. This is a huge change and we should embrace it. Mobile will play a big part.

10:47 am: Our biggest shows are “Morning Edition” and “All Things Considered.” Those are tent poles. We produce and distribute those. Others we only distribute, like “Fresh Air.”

10:49 am: Kara: So do these shows become Internet shows or radio shows?

10:49 am: Schiller: I think of them as shows. We’re agnostic about the way they listen to it. All of our revenue streams work equally well with each delivery method. And to the listener’s ear, it’s identical. So why should we care? Forty percent of weekday listening is in the car, which makes sense. When cars are Internet-enabled, that should be the same thing.

10:51 am: Kara–Will you ever charge for this stuff?

10:51 am: Schiller–Nope. That’s our mission, to provide this stuff for free. We ask our listeners to contribute, and about 10 percent of them do, pretty consistently. That said, on a B2B level, this could change. Our stations don’t pay for our Web programming right now, but that could change. They get it free with the radio license fees they already pay.

10:52 am: Kara–Do you think commercial radio will be able to charge for their shows on the Web?

10:53 am: Schiller–Question of the moment. There’s a disconnect. Do publishers need the money? Yes. Do people want to pay? Not in large numbers.

10:53 am: A memory trip back to NYT.com and its Times Select pay wall experiment.

Schiller–We got up to 200,000 subs, $10 million a year. But that was a pittance compared with ad revenue we were generating. And we had to weigh that against the audience weren’t reaching. We figured the $10 million wasn’t worth it. So we dropped the wall, and within a couple of months, our unique monthly users went from 12 million to 20 million. Did that immediately translate into revenue? No, not right away. But eventually.

10:55 am: Schiller–What they’re doing now, by the way, is not the same thing. It’s not going to cut off Tom Friedman from a kid in a Bangalore Internet cafe. So I think that could work.

10:56 am: Schiller asked to talk about Web news in general. A bow in the direction of “creative destruction”–in this case, laid-off journalists creating interesting stuff on the Web. The problem is that all of these sites, like the one in San Diego, etc., don’t have enough reach. So we should be able to partner with them, and create a “supernetwork”–”not a mega-portal” but partnerships between the smaller regional stations and the mother ship, etc. We already doing that with Pro Publica, etc.

10:58 am: Kara–What devices are most important to you?

10:59 am: Schiller–Of course, I need to praise the “magical device.” It’s “all things to all people.” I do wonder if it’s going to obsolete the iPod touch….We’ve had 300,000 downloads of the NPR iPad app. The trick is to create an app that takes particular advantage of the device.

Q&A:

Is there a way to support NPR without supporting the local station?

Schiller: No, not really. The lifeblood of NPR is the local station. You’ll note we always route the membership drives through the local station. However, we do have a philanthropic support through the NPR Foundation, but that’s not for small individual donations.

But the listener can go directly to NPR in the Web model, and doesn’t need to go to the local affiliate. So what’s the local affiliate’s role in the new paradigm?

Schiller: The fact that so few journalists are covering state and local news is scary. We’re committed to providing that local coverage via the affiliates. “We’ve got to have that local coverage, and NPR can’t do it….To the extent that [local coverage] doesn’t suit your needs, then we have to work together to make it meet your needs.”

Would NPR consider working with for-profit organizations to help solve the local news problem?

Schiller: We’re not constitutionally opposed to working with commercial entities. But I also think that some of the small, local nonprofits we’ve been talking about can make this work, too. Especially if we can leverage our strengths, which is one way to generate more philanthropy.

Are we always going to be counting on philanthropy to fund news coverage going forward?

Schiller: Yes.

How are you working to develop new shows that will become your next “All Things Considered,” “Morning Editions,” etc?

Schiller: We used to have a sort of TV-like development process where we spent a lot of time and money working on new shows. Instead, we’re incubating smaller scale things, like “Planet Money,” which isn’t a full show, and isn’t supposed to be a full show. But it’s a podcast and a touring show, etc. We can help people iterate without committing a lot of money.

You mentioned that both commercial publishers and not-for-profits get about 10 percent of their users to subscribe or donate. Is that 10 percent a universal truth?

Schiller: I hope not. I hope we can increase those numbers. “I don’t know what the answer is, but we’re going to try everything and see what sticks.”

A note about our coverage: This liveblog is not an official transcript of the conversation that occurred onstage. Rather, it is a compilation of quotes, paraphrased statements and ad-lib observations written and posted to the Web as quickly as possible. It is not intended as a transcript and should not be interpreted as one.

Karmazin credits some of his sales success to a new ad campaign. I guess he has to say that inasmuch as he approved the campaign, but I have a hard time believing it. I’ve seen this ad several times, but until I read this interview, I had no idea it was for Sirius (SIRI):

Meanwhile, maybe it’s just self-interest/projection, but I was struck by the fact that Karmazin seemed to go out of his way to tell the Reuters staff how little he thought of it.

Or maybe he was talking about journalists in general: After being greeted by a dozen Reuters reporters at the company’s Global Media Summit,” Karmazin declared that if he was running the news service, only one of them would be employed.

Here’s Reuters media reporter Robert MacMillan’s account of the exchange, via Twitter:

The company today announced plans to reduce its newsroom staff by eight percent by the end of 2009. Cuts will be made by buyout, but the company will resort to layoffs should its hand be forced.

“As before, if we do not reach 100 positions through buyouts, we will be forced to go to layoffs,” New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller wrote in a note to employees. I hope that won’t happen, but it might. I won’t pretend that these staff cuts will not add to the burdens of journalists whose responsibilities have grown faster than their compensation. Like you, I yearn for the day when we can do our jobs without looking over our shoulders for economic thunderstorms.”

Sad, sad news for a storied newspaper and an imperiled industry.

Keller’s memo in full, below:

Colleagues,

I had planned to invite you to the newsroom and break this news in person today, but I’ve been hit by something that seems to be the flu. Though I strongly believe in delivering bad news in person, I don’t want to add insult to injury by spreading infection.

Let me cut to the chase: We have been told to reduce the newsroom by 100 positions between now and the end of the year.

We hope to accomplish this by offering voluntary buyouts. On Thursday, the Company will be sending buyout offers to everyone in the newsroom. Getting a buyout package does NOT mean we want you to leave. It is simply easier to send the envelopes to everyone. If you think a buyout may be right for you, you have up to 45 days to decide whether you will accept it or not.

As before, if we do not reach 100 positions through buyouts, we will be forced to go to layoffs. I hope that won’t happen, but it might.

Our colleagues in editorial and op-ed, and on the business side, also face another round of budget cuts.

In recent years, we’ve managed to avoid the disabling cutbacks that have hit other newsrooms. The Company has chosen to protect the journalism by cutting production and other business-side costs, and the newsroom itself has managed its resources frugally. These latest cuts will still leave us with the largest, strongest and most ambitious editorial staff of any newsroom in the country, if not the world.

I won’t pretend that these staff cuts will not add to the burdens of journalists whose responsibilities have grown faster than their compensation. But we’ve been looking hard at ways to minimize the impact–in part, by re-engineering some of our copy flow. I won’t promise this will be easy or painless, but I believe we can weather these cuts without seriously compromising our commitment to coverage of the region, the country and the world. We will remain the single best news organization on earth.

I doubt that anyone is shocked by the fact of this, but it is happening sooner than anyone anticipated. When we took our 5 percent pay cuts, it was in the hope that this would fend off the need for more staff cuts this year. But I accept that if it’s going to happen, it should be done quickly. We will get through this and move on.

In my absence, Bill Schmidt and John and Jill have volunteered to take your questions this afternoon. Feel free to bring additional questions to me as soon as I’m back, or check with Bill Schmidt or John or Jill privately, or save them for the next Throw Stuff at Bill session, which is in a couple of weeks.

We often–and rightly–voice our gratitude that we work for a company and a family that prize quality journalism above all. I hope you know that the company and the family, and I, feel an equal debt of gratitude to all of you whose sacrifice and loyalty have kept us strong.

Like you, I yearn for the day when we can do our jobs without looking over our shoulders for economic thunderstorms.

Bill

As we wrote last week: It’s likely that nothing bad will happen.

Here’s how we ended up here: There are thousands of companies and independent researchers in the tech-security industry, most of which could benefit from a little publicity. And having read a newspaper once or twice, they know that sensationalism sells. So they gravitate towards a worst-case interpretation of the facts. Journalists, many of whom don’t really understand the technology being described, eat it up.

Read the rest of this post

Two thoughts on the Huffington Post’s newly announced $1.75 million “Huffington Post Investigative Fund”:

• It took a while, but Arianna Huffington has finally agreed to start paying her writers. Not the army of bloggers who contribute to the site, mind you. But the fund’s money is earmarked for “10 staff journalists who will primarily coordinate stories with freelancers,” she tells the AP. I predict that they’ll also have to hire an admin to deal with the deluge of pitches and resumes.
• The fund won’t solve the gaping hole opening up in American journalism: The disappearing beat writers who used to cover important but unsexy topics day in and day out, like health care, education or municipal government. But it does provide a nice parallel for the role of “investigative journalism” at most newspapers over the past couple decades: specialized, high-profile projects that didn’t have a commercial payoff and were underwritten by the papers’ other sections.

And one other thought: It’s easy enough to be cynical about this venture, but a lot of it sounds appealing, at least in theory. I’m particularly interested in the notion that the fund’s output “will be free for any media outlet to publish simultaneously.” Look forward to seeing the results.

While technologically and financially you are giants, morally you are pygmies.”

– Rep. Tom Lantos (D., Calif.), chairman of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, to Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang and General Counsel Michael Callaghan, Nov. 6, 2007

Yahoo’s public shaming before the House Foreign Affairs Committee last November apparently had quite an effect on Internet companies cooperating with Chinese government censorship and demands for information on dissidents. Less than a year after that brutal Capitol Hill humiliation, during which Committee Chairman Tom Lantos (D., Calif.) lambasted Yahoo’s leadership as moral “pygmies,” Yahoo (YHOO), along with Microsoft (MSFT) and Google (GOOG), is introducing a code of conduct that will govern their business practices in repressive countries. The Global Network Initiative, as it’s called, commits the companies to a general support for freedom of expression on the Internet, requiring them to at least try to “avoid or minimize the impact of government restrictions on freedom of expression” and to “narrowly interpret and implement government demands that compromise privacy.”

“The idea is that we believe the guidelines will need to be reviewed, and we will have to revise them as we take into account the actual experience,” said Sharon Hom, executive director of Human Rights in China, which helped draft the initiative. “It envisions an ongoing process of learning and sharing best practices.”

That’s a great step forward for firms like Google, which censors its search results in China, and Yahoo, which handed over emails to the Chinese government that led to the imprisonment of two journalists. But with no bans or sanctions on any specific conduct and most of its key guidelines left entirely up to interpretation, The Global Network Initiative seems more like an effort on the part of the participating companies to avoid legislation on their conduct abroad than anything else–a “We Promise to Be Good if You’ll Just Leave Us Alone” code, if you will. “After two years of effort, they have ended up with so little,” said Morton Sklar, executive director of the World Organization for Human Rights USA. “It is really very little more than a broad statement of support for a general principle without any concrete backup mechanism to ensure that the guidelines will be followed.”