You know the stereotype of the NPR listener: an EV-driving, Wordle-playing, tote bag"carrying coastal elite. It doesn't precisely describe me, but it's not far off. I'm Sarah Lawrence"educated, was raised by a lesbian peace activist mother, I drive a Subaru, and Spotify says my listening habits are most similar to people in Berkeley. I fit the NPR mold. I'll cop to that. So when I got a job here 25 years ago, I never looked back. As a senior editor on the business desk where news is always breaking, we've covered upheavals in the workplace, supermarket prices, social media, and AI. It's true NPR has always had a liberal bent, but during most of my tenure here, an open-minded, curious culture prevailed. We were nerdy, but not knee-jerk, activist, or scolding. In recent years, however, that has changed. Today, those who listen to NPR or read its coverage online find something different: the distilled worldview of a very small segment of the U.S. population
Who's the Typical NPR Listener? Wait Wait, Don't Tell Us ... (2015)
www.insideradio.com
... Totebags and the people who carry them: Through the roof! New demographic data from Gfk Mediamark Research & Intelligence LLC shows NPR listeners are just about what you might have imagined, which is something like a hyper-version of the cast of "Portlandia."
They're bright (70% have a college degree, compared to 28% of the U.S. population). They vote (74% cast a ballot in the last year). They like art (20% visited an art gallery or show in the last year, compared to just 7% of the rest of the U.S., and 38% went to a live music performance, 75% higher than the national average). And a quarter of them don't watch any primetime television.
There isn't a statistic showing their ber-tolerance when a little fun is poked at them, but everybody from "Saturday Night Live" to, well, NPR itself at pledge time, makes fun of the stereotypical National Public Radio listener and personality.
But be warned"that guy with the "Car Talk" mug may one day be your boss: NPR listeners are 162% more likely than the average worker to hold a professional or managerial role. And we're guessing, an NPR listener is 3,000 times more likely to be working on a Will Shortz puzzle on Sunday morning. ...
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