Think of it this way: The industry consensus is that NPR has fared much better in the digital transition than some of its news radio colleagues—yet NPR faces a more than $6 million deficit and opted to make crushing staff cuts last year.

Beyond financial woes, public radio still hasn't fully figured out what it is in the Internet age. At local affiliates, radio producers are still tethered to "the clock"—the down-to-the-second programming schedule that determines what goes on the air and when—even as listeners drift away from it and opt to listen on-demand instead. Journalism has become "unstuck in time," as the writer C.W. Anderson put it in a wonderful Nieman Journalism Lab essay, yet many of the people producing stories haven't entirely realized it yet.

Well, okay, some of them have: "Pandora is a personalized internet radio service that helps users find new music based on the individual’s favorites – does this sound too algorithmic for public radio?" the Corporation for Public Broadcasting asked in a 2010 report about the future of radio.

It didn't sound too algorithmic to a small team at NPR, which launched an experimental "infinite player" the next year in 2011 that was designed to endlessly stream programming fine-tuned to a listener's preferences based on how she rated what she was hearing. There are other experiments underway. Boston's WBUR recently used $250,000 in Knight Foundation grant money to launch BizLab, an incubator for fresh revenue models. Preventing NPR from being "doomed to repeat" the mistakes that newspapers have made in the digital age is one of Knight's goals, the foundation's CEO, Alberto Ibargüen, told me in an interview last year.

Print's ultimate downfall is in the collapse of its business model, but its failure to adapt—to realize you can't just package and distribute an old product on a new platform the way you did on the old one—is what made its decline so swift and certain.

One of public radio's greatest looming challenges, then, is to navigate its reach beyond a listening audience. After all, radio isn't just something you hear anymore. Just like a smartphone isn't just a phone and an Apple Watch is more of a data collector than a timekeeper.

Here's how NPR's creative director, Liz Danzico, explained it to Fast Company early this year:

Everyone knows what public radio sounds like. If you switched the dial they would be able to identify what NPR sounds like and they would also have a number of words that they say when they hit NPR. But if you ask someone what NPR looks like, what it feels like when it's in the room with us here, people don't know. This job is thinking about those aspects. What does it look like? What does it feel like?

And so, as engineers in Hawaii look for ways around the endangered tree snails that are keeping listeners from hearing NPR, NPR is looking for ways to be seen and felt, too.

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