The sweet, calming voice and gentle, nerdy humor of NPR radio is like home to me, like it is to a lot of people. I remember those comfy moments, driving around and listening to ‘All Things Considered.’ I’m guessing it’s the same way kids felt in the 50′s when their favorite radio personalities graced the airwaves.

NPR know how to tell a story, and tell it well, so it is no surprise that they are using their information-sharing savyness to penetrate online media, and are rising to the top doing it. They are one of the only news organizations that experienced a substantial growth in the last ten years as compared to their competitors who have seen a decline.

They are not afraid of digital media and this is what puts them ahead of the game. Here are 5 avenues NPR is taking to achieve success:

1) Facebook – NPR opened a Facebook page and has almost 400,000 fans. They also created an NPR podcast player application for facebook so you can listen to your favorite NPR stories right from your profile, as well as email favorites to your friends.

2) Twitter – Follow NPR news updates via twitter. You can choose to follow NPRNews, which has over 80,000 followers and/or NPRPolitics, which has approx. 700,000 followers.

3) iTunes – You can easily download their podcasts on iTunes. NPR update these 3 times a week and they are already getting about 1 million downloads per month. They also consistently appear on iTunes Top 10 list.

4) Blog – They have created a variety of separate blogs dedicated solely to subjects such as money, talk and news. These blogs are updated 3 times a week.

5) Open platform – Like a lot of online news sites, you can get by-the-hour updates on pretty much whatever you desire, whether it’s music, news, books, or science. But NPR introduced something new. They created an open platform, which enables their readers to create their own, personal podcasts and fool around with NPR content.

Kudos to NPR being ahead of the curve, there are a lot of other media companies that could learn from their example.

Image credit: Mr T in DC