As journalists working to fulfill NPR’s mission of creating a more informed public, the metrics of success for our work can be a bit more amorphous than in other professions.

How do you measure impact when your independent, nonprofit newsroom isn’t pressuring you to meet a quota on sales, clicks or signups?

If you ask the reporters, editors and producers from all over the world involved in creating our award-winning coverage on everything from TikTok’s internal policies to new voting districts in a disenfranchised Alabama community, they’d all have a different answer.

Sometimes it can be one email from a listener sharing how the information they’ve learned has helped them in their own lives.

Impact can be practical, like finally learning what kind of electric car to buy. And impact can be personal, like feeling a little more seen by reporting that covers the expanse of the opioid epidemic in the United States. Other times, impact can translate to real changes in local communities, or even the federal government.

The important thing to remember is that every ripple made by our coverage is tied to NPR’s core belief that we should live in a world challenged and invigorated by a deeper understanding and appreciation of events, ideas and cultures.

Below, you’ll find a list of stories compiled by NPR staffers that we felt prompted some of the strongest changes and reactions from our listeners, and the leaders in their communities too. It’s a good reminder of what our work can do — and how much we have cut out for us in the years to come.

The Education Department fixes its $1.8 billion FAFSA mistake

NPR’s Education Desk covered the problematic rollout of the FAFSA form in December 2023 and early January 2024, and it was our story that broke the news that the Biden administration was finally going to fix the biggest problem behind the rollout — a mistake that would have cost lower-income students dearly.

“For this story, we personified the mistake’s toll by finding a student and his mother who seemed to have been hurt by it (not easy since it was still early days),” reporter Cory Turner says. “Once we had the story ready, we did our due diligence, taking it to the Education Department for comment and to ask, once again, why they hadn’t yet agreed to fix this incredible mistake. It was in this back-and-forth, in this case just hours before the story was set to publish and air, that the Biden administration officially reversed itself and told NPR that it would, at last, fix the problem. … It’s impossible to know precisely what was happening behind the scenes at the Department, but this story — and the further discomfort it would have caused the administration — was certainly softened by the sudden, exclusive commitment to NPR in the opening sentences that a fix was finally on the way.”

Helping victims of crypto scams get their money back

This is a follow-up story to an investigation NPR reporter Bobby Allyn did of a crypto scam that was stealing the life savings of elderly people. After this story, the Massachusetts attorney general sued the obscure company Allyn investigated and got its crypto assets frozen by a judge, and one of the victims in the story got all of his money back — more than $140,000 that had been stolen from him.

“I first stumbled upon this story after meeting an elderly victim of the scam at a police station in LA,” Allyn says. “He was reporting the crime, and I chased him down after overhearing it, and took down his information. And months later, I published an investigation on the company’s tactics and how it managed to defraud him and others out of hundreds of thousands of dollars.”

Helping people learn how to reduce their stress

This year NPR offered our audiences a unique opportunity to learn science-backed stress reduction techniques through a collaboration with researchers at Northwestern University.

NPR Health Correspondent Allison Aubrey has been covering health and well-being for decades. She reported on a study by Judith Moskowitz, which showed that stress reduction techniques can help improve well-being in people who are dealing with significant stress, like caring for a loved one with Alzheimer’s disease or living with a cancer diagnosis.

Aubrey wanted to know if these same techniques would help people cope with everyday stress. Moskowitz agreed to open her stress reduction course to our audiences, and she will be analyzing the data in the new year. Aubrey also talked to many other researchers to bring our audiences the best science has to offer to help people cope with stress.

The response to this series was incredible. But most rewarding were the personal notes we got from people who took part in our series. Here are a few examples:

• “Thank you for creating this for everyone!” wrote Andy C., a high school counselor in Delaware. He has started a “Mid-Week Reset,” for his colleagues. “It helps my staff feel more connected to making the school a better place and allows me time to connect with my colleagues which makes me feel less alone and that I matter.”
• Kris G. is another teacher who loved our series. “I love its suggestions because they are realistic and usable for high school, middle school and elementary school. As a teacher, students always express their ‘stress’ and inability to move forward. These techniques quickly move them beyond the stress and make them re-center their fears as focus.”

Prompting a multimillion-dollar hospital donation from a tech billionaire after investigating his real estate investments

Dara Kerr reported this scoop about billionaire Marc Benioff buying up hundreds of acres of land in a small rural Hawaii town. Discussion in Hawaii among locals and the ensuing attention and questions the story generated galvanized Benioff himself to donate $150 million to hospitals in Hawaii within days of the story publishing.

The story generated a lot of buzz, with many big names in journalism “writing about it in their own columns or newsletters, focusing on the consequences of how billionaires choose to spend their money,” said chief business editor Pallavi Gogoi.

Prompting the VA to reassess an error in its mortgage program

In a yearlong series of stories, NPR held the Department of Veterans Affairs accountable for an error in its mortgage program that put tens of thousands of veterans at risk of losing their homes. Chris Arnold and Quil Lawrence won several awards for the early stories, but the impact was steady all year.

First the VA froze all foreclosures for six months. After more NPR stories, the VA extended that freeze at least until the end of this year. Further investigation revealed thousands of vets forced into terrible modified mortgages by the same VA screwup.

Natalie Donaldson is currently dealing with Veteran Affairs forbearance policy changes that resulted in her monthly payments jumping 50%.

Michael Noble Jr. for NPR/For NPR

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Eventually reporters were able to discover that at least 1,300 vets had been forced into loan modifications that raised their payments by 50%.

“Natalie Donaldson is one, and getting her help felt great, since she’d survived a traumatic time in the military. Keeping her home seemed key to her hard-won peace of mind,” Lawrence said.

Inspiring legislation to ban the practice of octopus farming in the U.S.

In February, NPR published a story looking at a Spanish seafood company’s bid to build what would be the world’s first massive octopus-farming facility, in the Canary Islands.

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-Rhode Island, noticed NPR’s story — and a few months later, he introduced a bill in Congress to ban any similar projects in the U.S.

“It was a neat surprise to get a note from the senator’s office saying he had noticed the story and was about to introduce a bill banning octopus farming. The bill hasn’t passed — but in August, 100 experts published a letter in Science magazine supporting the bill,” reporter Bill Chappell explained.

Shining a spotlight on what community care can look like worldwide

This is a bilingual visual story about Colombia’s caregivers that shows hard-working families, men, women and children taking care of themselves and their community. It was a finalist at the National Association of Hispanic Journalist awards this year in the digital story category, in Spanish and in English, and was also a finalist in photography.

“It’s about a unique solutions story from a part of the world which we don’t hear many solutions stories from. Their community center is funded by a local government assistance project; the images show them in everyday activities at home and in their community. The story brings to life a community we don’t hear much about. The world needs to know there are efforts afoot to make this world a better place,” wrote NPR’s Laura Soto-Barra, who contributed to the story.
 

Amplifying the growing worldwide struggle for families to be able to feed their children

This story spotlighted a “silent” issue — the struggle of working families to afford three healthy meals a day for their kids — to the fore. Reader response was strong, expressing a desire to help. One of the families will be featured on the Dr. Phil talk show next year, and one of the photographers said he brought food and other gifts to the family he’d profiled.

JUL 21, 2024. Snacks are an important part of Tomás’ nutritional diet. So his parents have followed a diet outside of junk food on most occasions. Here Tomás eats puffed rice cereal while his parents cook.

Alejandra Leyva for NPR

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“A U.N. report this year highlighted the growing issue of malnutrition among kids under age 5 as families struggle to afford food that is often more expensive due to climate-related growing issues. We wanted to know who those families are and worked with The Everyday Project, a global consortium of photojournalists, to identify and profile 9 families around the world, from Mississippi to Mexico to Malaysia,” wrote Marc Silver, one of the story’s editors.

Connecting listeners with a community land trust in Lahaina

After this story aired on the uncertainty of property rights in Lahaina after the fire disaster there, the folks in the story received a surge in donations, as well as support and offers to help from around the country. At first, they were confused why people so far from the Maui community were getting in touch. Then they realized their story had been on NPR.

Lauren Sommer was one of the first reporters in Lahaina after the extreme wildfire destroyed homes and took lives.

“I stayed in touch with a few sources, including a few that were very concerned their friends and neighbors wouldn’t be able to afford to rebuild, allowing developers to buy properties in a tourism hotspot. They started the community land trust from scratch, learning as they went, and I was able to go back to Maui to cover it and a few other stories. At a time when they felt the national media had forgotten about Lahaina’s disaster, they were very grateful that NPR returned,” Sommer wrote.

Giving listeners tools to stay healthy while scrolling

In 2024, season two of Body Electric featured host Manoush Zomorodi diving further into the impact of technology on our health, including how scrolling affects our breathing and what earbuds are doing to our hearing. The BE team also started a new type of podcast episode: 5-minute walk-and-talk breaks with Zomorodi.

As part of this series, the team worked with researchers at Columbia University Medical Center to understand how we can offset the detrimental effects of this screen-filled lifestyle. Last year, the team at Columbia published a study that found regular movement breaks — five minutes out of every thirty — counteracted the harmful effects of sitting all day.

“In 2023, over 23,000 people joined a Body Electric challenge to move for five minutes every half-hour, every hour or every two hours for two weeks and report back to researchers,” said host Manoush Zomorodi on NPR’s Morning Edition.

Spurring the DOJ to investigate how targeted violence was handled in some Virginia schools

“This was way off my usual beat — I’m a business reporter — but I’d previously done a story on growing Latino populations in the area and how that fueled the growth of different businesses,” said WHRO reporter Ryan Murphy.

One of the contacts from that story called him months later to say she’d heard from families about this targeted violence in the schools, and the dismissiveness of school officials, and didn’t know where else to turn for relief, Murphy said.

Teresa Rodriguez (left) and Leo Medina (center right) worry about sending their sons to school after the boys were attacked in December by a large group outside Norview High.

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“This source connected me with families and translated during interviews to help me tell a story about a community that, because of language barriers, often goes overlooked — a story I couldn’t have brought to light by myself,” he said.

Now, the Department of Justice has launched an (still ongoing) investigation into how this violence was handled.

Helping consumers across the Gulf South navigate outlandish utility bills

This series from the Gulf States Newsroom highlighted a utility billing issue — and its possible solution — each month from around the Gulf South.

The work of reporters Stephan Bisaha and Drew Hawkins produced a variety of impacts, including engaging the community through callout sourcing. Many people featured in the stories reported back that their experiences prompted utility companies to look into their issues — some for the first time, despite many previous calls, and some reported that their stories prompted utility companies to move their issue up the priority list.

“The thing is, though, these complaints tend to act like the problems are unique to each city. In reality, they’re endemic across the region. It took a few years of hearing stories of missing water bills in Birmingham, inexplicable power expenses in New Orleans and the 2022 water crisis in Jackson for me to realize how this is really a shared tradition,” wrote Bisaha, who also won a Murrow award for his reporting on this piece.

Providing resources to voters in a historically disenfranchised and newly formed voting district in Alabama

Maya Miller and Nellie Beckett spent months leading up to the November election covering the issues facing Alabama’s newly created District 2, and the effort there to get out the vote and represent this historically marginalized area. With support from WFYI’s America Amplified initiative, they produced stories and social content that highlighted the intersecting challenges and concerns of central Alabama.

Gulf States Newsroom community engagement reporter Maya Miller hears from Alabama State University student leader and District 2 voter Tyrin Moorer outside of the Dunn-Oliver Acadome in Montgomery, Alabama, on Nov. 5, 2024.

Nellie Beckett/Gulf States Newsroom

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The impact included local political strategists sharing out the FAQ voter guide, and 527 downloads of the Gulf States Gumbo podcast unpacking the project to cover District 2.

The team pursued this coverage to tell the story of a historically marginalized area in Alabama, newly recognized with redistricting as a focus of Black voting power and a region with assets to frame as well as challenges to tackle. Tackling stories of issues and voting power led Maya and Nellie down the path of community engagement reporting.

This story received contributions from Arielle Retting, Manuela López Restrepo, and Amy Morgan.

When David Brown moved from Chicago to Los Angeles this summer, one of the first things he did was download an app that aims to “fight big-city loneliness.”

The 35-year-old sales director had seen an Instagram ad for Timeleft, which matches users with strangers for dinner via a personality algorithm. Since he only knew a handful of people in his new city, he decided to give it a shot.

On the night of his first dinner, Brown, a self-described introvert, was “super nervous” as Timeleft provides participants with limited details about who they will be dining with, including their job industry and zodiac sign. No names or photos are disclosed. But Brown’s fears were quickly dispelled once the host led him to his assigned table and he met the other diners, who were just as anxious as he was.

“Everybody kind of committed to the experience and was just open minded,” says Brown, who lives in West Hollywood. Afterward, the group went to a bar hangout, also facilitated by Timeleft, for drinks and to meet other app users who also went to a dinner that night.

“I made at least two best friends at that first dinner,” says Brown, adding that one of them is now his roommate. Since then, he’s been going to Timeleft dinners almost every week and has started an Instagram group for users to stay in touch.

Brown is one of nearly 10,000 Angelenos who have attended a Timeleft dinner since the platform — which started in Lisbon last year and is now in more than 300 cities in 65 countries — expanded to L.A. in May. Los Angeles is the app’s second- largest market in the United States, behind New York City.

Every Wednesday (excluding some holidays), Timeleft hosts more than 400 dinners in L.A. neighborhoods — stretching from Santa Monica to North Hollywood — with the purpose of helping attendees meet new people and hopefully make a friend. In an effort to combat loneliness, particularly during the holiday season — a 2023 survey by ValuePenguin found that 61% of Americans expected to feel lonely or sad during the season — Timeleft is hosting dinners on Dec. 25 and Jan. 1, both of which fall on a Wednesday. Among the participating restaurants, which are open to the public on the holidays, are Butcher’s Daughter, Zinque and Formosa Cafe.

Carlie Armstrong, who leads Timeleft’s West Coast region, says the company wanted to offer an alternative option during the holidays for people who may have lost loved ones, who live far from their families or those who may not have a good relationship with them.

“This is also a particularly polarizing year so there are a lot of people who maybe are shying away from those interactions and maybe want to try something new during this time, but still be with other people,” she says. A recent American Psychological Association survey of more than 2,000 U.S. adults found that nearly 40% participants said they are avoiding relatives they disagree with politically during the holiday season.

Jonathan Alexander listens to Cristina Haraba talk during a recent Timeleft dinner with strangers at Bacari in West Hollywood.

(Etienne Laurent / For The Times)

Each of the holiday dinners will follow the format a typical Timeleft gathering. To join, you can purchase a ticket for $16 or sign up for a membership starting at $26 per month, then you will be prompted to select your preferred dinner date. Users can also indicate their budget for dinner as the app works with various types of restaurants (casual, fine dining, etc.). On the Tuesday before the event, you’ll receive a brief introduction about your fellow diners. Guests are responsible for paying for their own meals.

Before your Timeleft dinner, you’ll learn a few details about your fellow diners in the app.

I attended my first Timeleft dinner last month at Bacari in West Hollywood. Upon arrival, I showed the hostess my table number, which was provided by the app, and two other folks who were there for the dinner introduced themselves to me. A staffer then guided us to our table and eventually four other diners — one of whom was celebrating his birthday — trickled in to join us. Everyone in my group had attended at least five dinners with the platform, so they were past the awkwardness that you’d think would come from meeting with a group of strangers for the first time.

Conversation flowed effortlessly at our table, so much so that we didn’t even pull out the question game that Timeleft provides to help break the ice. As we threw back strong cocktails and nibbled on delicious shareable plates, we talked about our jobs, hobbies, hometowns and upbringings (one woman had moved to L.A. from Romania). At one point, I told the group that someone I used to date, but hadn’t seen in a year, had walked into the room, which launched a venting session about dating woes in L.A. We were comfortable, to say the least, and anyone walking by would’ve thought we’d known each other much longer than two hours.

The restaurant would only take a limited number of credit cards although staff encouraged us to share plates, so we had a minor headache trying to figure out how to split the bill. Ultimately, one person put their card down and we sent them money.

Maxime Barbier, who lives in Paris, founded Timeleft in 2023 because he wanted to help people combat loneliness in big cities.

(Etienne Laurent / For The Times)

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Cristina Haraba, 42, who moved to L.A. from London three years ago, is considering attending one of the app’s holiday dinners because she doesn’t have any family in town. Like Brown, she came across an ad for Timeleft on Instagram and decided to go because she was struggling to make friends.

“It’s difficult to meet people in L.A. and I know it’s not just me because a lot of the people who’ve come to these dinners have been living in L.A. for 20 years. Some of them were born here,” says Haraba, who said she is used to having a “very rich social life.”

Haraba, who’s originally from Romania, has been to about six Timeleft dinners so far and has made a few friends she still keeps in touch with. What keeps her coming back is the opportunity to try new restaurants in her area and meet interesting people who she can explore the city with, she says.

Timeleft founder Maxime Barbier, who lives in Paris, says it was important for him to target the app to folks of various ages, including people like his 71-year-old dad. Barbier encouraged his dad to attend a dinner after he suffered a serious brain accident that caused him to be less social. He now goes at least once a month, Barber says.

“Something I find sad is that all the new concepts are really focused on the new generation like ‘This is only for Gen Z,’” Barbier says. “But people who are the same age as my parents know how to use a computer or an iPhone and I think they need help because they [can get] lonely.” At most Timeleft dinners, people are paired with people who are within 10 years of their age, but some folks have been matched with folks of other generations as well.

Myra Hermosa, 37, grew up in the San Fernando Valley, but recently moved back to the area after living in San Diego and North Carolina for a few years.

“What sold it for me was that you have five people at that dinner table who you never would’ve met had you just gone through your day to day life,” says Myra Hermosa, 37.

(Etienne Laurent / For The Times)

“When I got back here, I was like “Welp, most of my friends are gone, or at least not in the area,” says Hermosa, who works from home. She decided to attend her first Timeleft dinner this summer because she was “itching to get out, make friends and be social again,” she says.

“What sold it for me was that you have five people at that dinner table who you never would’ve met had you just gone through your day to day life. And they were just sharing their stories, their background, where they come from and what they do for a living,” Hermosa says, adding that she met an actress and an army veteran. They played Timeleft’s game in the app, which included reflective questions like “Why did you move to L.A.?” and “What is an event that had a significant impact on your life?” “I figured how crazy is it that these five people are sitting at a table and actually talking and interacting? This is kind of cool.”

For those who are thinking about attending one of Timeleft’s holiday dinners or on another Wednesday night, former attendees say it’s essential to remain open, be yourself and to follow up if you vibe with someone.

“Don’t be afraid to be honest,” says Brown, adding that the dinners have helped him gain confidence. “If you can’t be vulnerable, it’s going to be really hard for people to relate to you in your experience. We’re all at this dinner table for a reason. Most of us are here to make more friends, not just to sit at dinner with a stranger for two and a half hours.”

Sports fans who tuned into Netflix’s landmark streaming Wednesday of two NFL games may have felt a bit of troubling déjà vu – at first.

That’s because this crucial event – signaling the entry of the industry’s largest streaming service into the blockbuster business of professional football – kicked off with audio problems in the early moments of host Kay Adams’ opening presentation.

It was a worrying callback to problems Netflix had with its last big live event, the boxing match in November between YouTube star Jake Paul and former champ Mike Tyson when viewers struggled with blurry audio and got regularly kicked off the live stream.

Fortunately, Adams’ sound problems were quickly fixed, allowing Netflix to step up with a two-game programming event that felt like the streaming service’s version of the Super Bowl – complete with a lushly-produced halftime show for its second game featuring pop superstar Beyoncé that could stand up to any Big Game presentation.

In fact, the actual football games may have been the least impressive part of Netflix’s big day, as Super Bowl champions the Kansas City Chiefs ran over the Pittsburgh Steelers in the first game, 29-10 and the Baltimore Ravens dominated the Houston Texans on their home turf for the second contest, 31-2.

Netflix’s broadcast on Wednesday got off to a rocky start with audio problems from host Kay Adams.

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Stacking its teams of hosts and commentators with experienced broadcasters, Netflix delivered a mostly smooth visual presentation with lots of glitzy graphics and all the information fans needed to follow the game. The connection issues that plagued the Tyson/Paul fight seemed largely absent, at least for this viewer, particularly while watching the games in slightly delayed playback.

According to Netflix, more than 200 countries tuned in at some point during the Chiefs vs. Steelers contest, making it the second most popular live title on the streaming service.

So, it makes sense the streamer would take advantage of the occasion to shoehorn in lots of references to other Netflix products, including a pregame interview with WWE wrestler Liv Morgan to prompt the debut of WWE Raw live events next month and realistic-looking football-shaped cakes tying into the streamer’s game show Is It Cake?

There were also loads of commercials, which seemed to play even for subscribers with ad-free plans, though if you watched the games via replay, you could skip past them.

But the full games expired from Netflix three hours after the event; two programs offering highlights from each game’s plays are available to watch on demand, and the streamer says Beyoncé’s halftime show will also be offered as a standalone program to rewatch.

Queen Bey, a Houston native, certainly brought the fire to her hometown for what the streamer dubbed the “Beyoncé Bowl” halftime show. Performing songs from her album Cowboy Carter for the first time – including her reboots of “Jolene” and “Blackbird” – she was a vision in white and sequins backed by a cavalcade of dancers decked out in white cowboy hats and ace collaborators like Post Malone and Shaboozey. Her daughter, Blue Ivy, even made an appearance.

Beyoncé’s epic live performance lasted more than 13 minutes – handily overshadowing Mariah Carey’s pre-taped appearances before each game – also proving that Netflix could muster the production value and imagery to match any Super Bowl-level performer.

Which was, ultimately, the most important point of the entire day – proving that the streaming service is ready to compete with the big dogs of broadcasting by offering glitch-free NFL games live to a subscriber base of more than 282 million accounts.

Netflix isn’t the only streamer offering live NFL games. Amazon’s Prime Video has Thursday Night Football and Peacock also offers live coverage of some NFL games. But Netflix, as the largest and most profitable streaming service, has a symbolic and substantial impact when it comes to a certain kind of programming.

With its plans to stream WWE Raw live events starting next month and a new deal to present the FIFA Women’s World Cup, Netflix is turning toward one area of television streaming services haven’t yet dominated: live sports.

What that ultimately means for the future of television – and the future of sports media – we may just be starting to learn.