When most folks think about George Foster Peabody awards for distinguished broadcast journalism, famous recipients like Edward R. Murrow or the Frontline TV series come to mind. Certainly the vast majority of Peabody picks are either people or programs. But the latest winners, announced on Wednesday, include a website: National Public Radio's "topically boundless counterpart," as Peabody calls it. Everybody else knows the site as npr.org.

"A whole lot of things considered, from 'South Park' to North Korea, make this one of the great one-stop websites," Peabody adds. Needless to say, the suits over at the service are tickled pink by this prize.

"For all of us, today's awards speak to NPR's ability to adapt and grow while continuing to tell stories and create new online features that serve your needs and interests," NPR Vice Presidents Ellen Weiss and Kinsey Wilson declared on the network's blog.

Indeed, npr.org is quite something. You can get the latest news, or hourly news, access a slew of music, listen to concerts, tune into all your favorite NPR shows, follow dozens of interviews, stick NPR widgets on your desktop, listen to great features about culture, find your local NPR station, or growl at NPR's ombudsman, Alicia Shepard, all on one easy to navigate portal.

And the entire site comes—dare we say it—without commercial Web ads (save for NPR donation widgets and the NPR Shop, of course).

But this award reflects more than the appeal and usefulness of NPR's website. We think it's recognition that NPR represents one of broadcast radio's few success stories over the last decade.

Radio survivor

The master narrative of radio was brutally but accurately summarized by a Boston Globe market survey report in 2005: "On Demand Killed the Radio Star—How Satellite Radio, the Internet, Podcasting and MP3 Players Are Changing the Terrestrial Radio Landscape." Add to that the foolhardy broadcasting mergers which followed the Telecom Act of 1996, mix in this nasty recession, and you wind up with train wrecks like Citadel media, the nation's third biggest broadcaster, whose shares closed at 1.6 cents last December following the company's bankruptcy announcement.

NPR has not only survived all this, but compared to the rest of the pack, the network is thriving. The service saw a huge boost in its listenership during the 2008 election—a 7% jump, bringing the audience to 27.5 million listeners weekly. At present, a third of the nation's FM radio stations are classified as "educational," and over 900 of those are either NPR affiliate stations or run some NPR programming.

On top of this, NPR has pursued an aggressive Internet and mobile broadband strategy, with a terrific Public Radio Player for the iPhone, which now has 2.5 million subscribers. You can reach hundreds of public radio stations with the app, picking and choosing which show you want to listen to and when, or opting for demand streams that can be accessed at any time.

Plus there's a mobile NPR.org (m.npr.org), and an NPR news app for the Android. It allows for backgrounding, so users can access other applications while tuning into headlines. And of course since it's an Android, the code is open source.

And last week, NPR released a new read-write API that will allow other media services to post content to NPR as well as receive it. The first participants in this experiment include Oregon Public Broadcasting and the Northwest News Network, followed by KQED in San Francisco, WBUR in Boston, and WXPN in Philadelphia.

More to come

Such is NPR's zeal for keeping up with the cyberJoneses that the network is promising that it will be completely iPad compatible when said famous device is released by Apple on April 3.

"From day one, iPad users who visit the NPR website will get an experience that is optimized for the device," the Inside NPR blog pledges. "Features like the NPR audio player have been given greater visibility and adapted for the unique technical requirements of this new platform; we've modified the navigation and made the site more 'touch' friendly; and we've improved the sponsorship experience—all without changing the main site."

Proactive, adaptive, and imaginative, public radio is keeping radio alive. Congratulations to npr.org.