NPR's 'Morning Edition' Gets New Format Clock

NPR this week introduced a new clock for its Morning Edition newsmagazine.

Newscasts had aired each hour at 1 minute after the hour and again at 19 minutes and 42 minutes after the hour. Now, while there is the same amount of newscast time, it is grouped in just two breaks, at more intuitive times at the top and bottom of the hour — as was the case for most of Morning Edition's nearly four-decade history.

The bigger significance in the adjustments is the potential that the changes unlock, including allowing for two slightly longer blocks of uninterrupted news time within each hour. Most notably, the news block that leads off the hour will gain a minute for stories and interviews, for a total uninterrupted time of 11 minutes and 29 seconds.

The last time NPR changed the Morning Edition clock was in November 2014. A spike in listener complaints followed; listeners told my office that the new format felt choppier and more commercial.

The 2014 change was made, under a previous management team, because there was a belief that listeners wanted to tune in and not have to wait to hear the news headlines, according to Sarah Gilbert, NPR's acting vice president for news programming.

But "news consumption habits are changing very rapidly," Gilbert said. New evidence shows the audience is increasingly getting headlines from mobile phones, news alerts and social media. So the new clock will offer headlines, but then quickly follow with content that provides "deep dive, context and deep reporting."

The changes are expected to have another outcome that NPR  hopes will become apparent to listeners. With slightly more time for individual interviews, the hosts doing live interviews will theoretically no longer find themselves cutting off guests mid-thought because they have run out of time.

"It's something we have been struggling with under the old clock model; there wasn't quite enough room to finish that arc" of a conversation, Gilbert said. "The new clock should make that easier."