A story in today's Wall Street Journal leads with the anecdote of an American woman in Beijing who has become a fan of Warren Olney and KCRW via iTunes.

[She] is one of the reasons that KCRW, one of the nation's largest public radio stations, experienced a big jump in its online audience starting last year. Tens of thousands of new listeners were checking out its online stream, and most of them weren't anywhere near the station's Southern California home....

KCRW online had 760,000 unique visitors in October, according to Google Analytics, a Web analysis service. At this time last year, the number was about 585,000. That puts the online audience well over the terrestrial audience of almost 600,000.

KCRW is a leading example of how public radio stations are aggressively pushing high-definition radio, live streaming of programs, podcasting and other technology-driven improvements -- and in the process demonstrating the potential the Internet may hold for all radio stations, public or commercial.

[snip]

KCRW station manager Ruth Seymour says the online world is forcing her to think a little more like a commercial broadcaster in terms of attracting sponsors, because she's reaching a broad new audience. The new distribution channels are bringing in not just geographic diversity, she says, but people who normally wouldn't listen to public radio, or maybe any radio. When it comes to the podcasts, "they don't even know they're listening to a radio station," she says. "How in the hell are you going to get someone like that to subscribe?"

One of the manifestations: going after national underwriters rather than local donors. The story is subscription only.