No Rush.

     No hectoring, hateful hosts here.     

      From the Washington Post:

     At a time when newspapers, magazines and TV news continue to lose readers and viewers, at least one part of the traditional media has continued to grow robustly: National Public Radio.

     The audience for NPR's daily news programs, including "Morning Edition" and "All Things Considered," reached a record last year, driven by widespread interest in the presidential election, and the general decline of radio news elsewhere. Washington-based NPR will release new figures to its stations today showing that the cumulative audience for its daily news programs hit 20.9 million a week, a 9 percent increase over the previous year.

     The weekly audience for all the programming fed by Washington-based NPR -- including talk shows and music -- also reached a record last year, with 23.6 million people tuning in each week, an 8.7 percent increase over 2007.

     The favorable audience data, however, hasn't spared NPR from the budget woes that are affecting almost every news organization in the nation.

     NPR faces declining funding from all its major sources: corporate underwriters that give money in exchange for on-air mentions, charitable foundations and annual dues from almost 900 member stations. Many NPR member stations have announced staff cutbacks of their own in the face of declining listener contributions and other revenue.

     NPR's rising popularity reflects the decline of news as a radio format, said Mark Jurkowitz, associate director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, a Washington think tank. Producing an original newscast is expensive, especially compared with playing music or airing syndicated talk shows; many radio companies have pared back or eliminated their news departments as the industry has consolidated over the past decade. "Local news stations have slowly but steadily vanished in a lot of cities," said Jurkowitz.

     One strength of NPR, he said, is its original foreign reporting -- something that is now largely unavailable elsewhere on the radio. The organization maintains 18 foreign bureaus, more than any of the major broadcast TV networks.

     Its reports from abroad, he said, are a magnet "for a lot of people who weren't necessarily born in this country who may see NPR as the one place to get news about parts of the world they care about."