Heavy focus on telling emotionally driven stories and a high percentage of stories focusing on inequalities and disadvantaged people.

NPR is "national public radio", known mainly for news programming, though they also carry other sorts of programs (humor, for instance). Only a tiny sliver of their operation is publicly (i.e. by government) funded, despite the name. This tiny bit often comes under attack because they're perceived as left-wing propagandists by the right (but so are most news outlets that aren't quite right-wing, so that means little on its own). At any rate, it's uncontroversial to note that they are some of the only news or political programming on the radio, in most parts of the country, that isn't very, very right wing.

They famously hold funding drives a couple times a year, interrupting much of their usual programming to ask their listeners for donations... but these are also only a small part of their funding, and the drives amount to a kind of roundabout advertising or PR more than anything else.

Most of their funds come from corporate and non-profit donors. [EDIT] And these get ads on the stations, read by NPR staff. "Donors", but actually many are just businesses paying for ads, like any other station has. This practice has gone from "they might name their donors sometimes" to "they frequently read ad copy on-air for them" in the last couple decades.

On the left—so, among their traditional listenership—they are perceived, increasingly, as having a strong pro-corporate and pro-status-quo bias. This crowd perceives them as staunch defenders of the neo-liberal consensus that's driven US economic and foreign policy since the 80s, though they are (as corporations have, now that it's convenient, become) left-leaning on many social issues.

Basically, lots and lots of people, right and left, don't like them. One might take this as a sign they're doing something right, but... well, I'll leave it to the listener to judge the quality of their coverage, whatever its leaning, for themselves. Suffice it that I, at least, think it's gone from "pretty good" in the '00s to total crap, now. IMO the best news coverage in a given broadcast day, for my local NPR affiliate, is when they're just re-broadcasting the BBC.

I think it stands for "Nice, Polite Republicans"