WASHINGTON – NPR’s Kelsey Snell would normally have spent last week covering Nancy Pelosi and Mitch McConnell as the congressional correspondent for “Morning Edition” and “All Things Considered.” But it wasn’t a normal week for anyone at NPR.

Instead, she was out of work – one of dozens in NPR’s 520-person Washington newsroom who are going on unpaid weeklong furloughs this summer under a cost-saving agreement between NPR’s management and its newsroom.

“Please support your local public radio station!” she tweeted before ducking out for the week.

For decades, the P in NPR stood for “public,” as in publicly-supported, non-commercial radio and digital news. Yet with its growing reliance on corporate advertising, NPR has found itself on equally troubled footing as its for-profit competitors, all of them reliant on the same pool of ad dollars that have dried up during the coronavirus pandemic.

At the same time, ratings have taken a hit, with stay-at home orders keeping many devoted listeners out of their vehicles and thus away from their radios, raising concerns about the impact on public donations to hundreds of member stations.

A sharp downturn in underwriting – public broadcasting’s euphemism for its style of advertising – prompted NPR to adopt a package of pay cuts, furloughs and other concessions in April. Yet NPR will still show a deficit of about $10 million when its fiscal year closes in September, its widest in years, chief executive John Lansing said.

The new year starting in October figures to be even tougher. Without another round of givebacks, Lansing is projecting a deficit of $30 million to $43 million – by far the largest in NPR’s 50-year history.

Advertisers began to grow wary in March as the full dimension of the pandemic became clear. Many paused or canceled spots on NPR’s shows, Lansing said, tearing a hole in budget projections for the year.

“When the economy all but shut down, companies cut their marketing expenses. We felt it,” said Lansing, who became NPR’s chief executive in October.

NPR, of course, was founded to stand apart from the ups and downs of the commercial marketplace.

It was established in 1970, alongside television’s Public Broadcasting Service, as a kind of national trust, supported through federal funds and fees and dues paid by affiliated, though independently operated, public stations across the nation. (NPR doesn’t hold pledge drives, but its stations do.)

To wean itself from government funding – and the political battles that accompany it – NPR began courting advertisers. Ad money was projected this year to pass station fees as its largest source of revenue, accounting for just more than a third of its $275 million annual budget. Nowadays, the federal government directly contributes only about 1 percent of its operating funds.

This raises a definitional question: Can NPR still be called a non-commercial broadcaster? The more immediate question remains how the organization can muddle through the coronavirus crisis that has pushed many news organizations to the brink, and a few over it, even as the news – the health crisis, mass protests, an election – has intensified.

The cost-cutting agreement negotiated in April between NPR’s management and its main employee union, SAG-AFTRA, didn’t spare its executives, nor its stars. Lansing took a 25 percent pay cut, at the top of a sliding scale that will reduce pay for every employee earning more than $80,000 annually. Among those who will be furloughed next month is Supreme Court reporter Nina Totenberg, who has worked at NPR since 1975.

The intent of the agreement, which will save about $15 million through September, was to avoid layoffs, according to Richard Harris, a veteran science correspondent and one of the shop stewards who negotiated the package.

So far, NPR hasn’t laid off anyone nor cut its programming schedule.

“We felt like we were all in this together,” Harris said. “It was one of the least acrimonious negotiations I’ve been in. We all had big, common goals.”

But things figure to become tougher before they get better. With fewer people commuting, fewer people are listening: NPR said the audience for “Morning Edition” and “All Things Considered” declined an average of 28 percent in the 50 largest cities over the past three months, compared with the same period in 2019.

If the decline persists, a smaller national audience could translate into lower revenues from sponsors that pay NPR for the short messages broadcast on its programs and podcasts. And fewer listeners means fewer fans for local stations to nudge for donations during pledge drives – which could make it harder for the stations to afford to pay NPR for its programming.

The one bit of good news for NPR is that its digital operations are surging as people search for news, information and entertainment online.

Traffic to NPR.org increased by 76 percent this spring compared to a year ago, according to internal figures. A daily coronavirus podcast launched at the start of the pandemic quickly became one of the 10 most popular in the country (it’s now called “Consider This,” with a broader focus).

Podcasts produced by NPR’s “Code Switch” unit, focused on racial issues, also zoomed up the charts, reaching No. 1 on Apple’s weekly list amid the protests over police brutality. Overall, downloads of NPR-produced podcasts have increased 24 percent compared to last year.

But financial pressure is already being felt on its network of stations, many of which are small and rely on a combination of listener contributions, federal dollars and support from a college or university. Several have already started painful downsizings.