Unique Morning Show on NPR Thrives as Others Slip

A look at National Public Radio’s “Morning Edition,” the highest-rated news program on radio.

The program is holding onto its audience at a time when declines are the norm across the fractionalized media landscape. The program is adapting to the Web by letting listeners download episodes to music players and by taking photographers and videographers along on reporting trips. “We want to replicate ‘Morning Edition’ in all the other spheres that our audience is likely to reach us,” said Madhulika Sikka, the program’s executive producer, who was promoted last week to oversee all of the NPR news division’s reporters and editors and help set its news agenda. The public radio organization will start a search for a replacement producer soon. All this might surprise people who still associate “Morning Edition” with Bob Edwards, who hosted the program since its inception in 1979 and was pushed out by NPR in 2004, months shy of his 25th anniversary. The decision was widely criticized, and some claimed that the program would fail without him. But it has actually thrived.