Steve Inskeep, co-host of NPR’s “Morning Edition,” is stepping up to the plate in defending NPR. He writes for the Wall Street Journal on Thursday:

I can point out that the recent tempests over “perceived bias” have nothing to do with what NPR puts on the air. The facts show that NPR attracts a politically diverse audience of 33.7 million weekly listeners to its member stations on-air. In surveys by GfK MRI, most listeners consistently identify themselves as “middle of the road” or “conservative.”

As for James O’Keefe, the activist whose video prank led to NPR chief executive Vivian Schiller losing her job, Inskeep loftily recounts hearing of the story while he was reporting from Egypt. When he had dinner that night with the NPR Cairo bureau, they barely discussed the NPR news back home. Writes Inskeep:

I noticed a contrast between the news that NPR reports from the Arab world and the news NPR has lately made at home. Each news story revealed the values of the people reporting it… I congratulate Mr. O’Keefe for upholding his values: faith in the power of video to mislead.

Zing! NPR could have used some of Inskeep’s backbone when the O’Keefe story broke, before it fell over itself apologizing and getting rid of people. Now this latest defense might just be too late.

National Public Radio is increasing its focus on diversity with the addition of a new senior manager role.

Keith Woods, the dean of faculty at the Poynter Institute, has been named as the first vice president in charge of Diversity in News and Operations for the nonprofit organization. In his new role, Woods, a former consultant to NPR, will “lead the development of NPR’s vision and strategy for diversity, and will play a central role in its implementation across the NPR newsroom, throughout the organization and in the public radio community as a whole,” NPR said. He will join NPR full-time in February.

Woods, a journalism veteran who has served on two Pulitzer Prize juries, will work with NPR’s CEO Vivian Schiller to help broaden the radio network’s content in order to reach a more diverse audience. He will also provide coaching and training throughout the organization and its member stations to help deal with issues of “content, recruiting and workplace environment strategies,” the company said.

Full release after the jump

NPR’s Schiller: “Our Plans For Going Forward Is More”

(Photo by Kenny Irby)

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Last night, New York public radio station WNYC threw a gala at Gotham Hall to celebrate its recent acquisition of New York’s classical radio station WQXR and honor its former owner, The New York Times Co.

Hosted by Alec Baldwin, the evening featured performances by folksinger Judy Collins and opera diva Deborah Voigt. David Sanger, a New York Times correspondent and host of the “Washington Report” on WQXR — and grandson of the station’s founder Elliott Sanger — presented the Times Co. with an award, accepted by Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr., commemorating the company’s stewardship of WQXR since 1944.

Later, Baldwin announced that the winner of the evening’s raffle would get a radio — actually, an Internet radio tuned to WQXR. “The New York Times got a piece of glass, for the millions and millions of dollars they’ve coughed up,” he said. “A piece of glass. The winner of the raffle gets a radio.”

(Video and more pictures after the jump)

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Vivian Schiller, Soledad O’Brien and Alan Miller Photo via Meredith Goncalves

Last night, Time Warner hosted a litany of major media players, all gathered in support of The News Literacy Project. Founded by Alan Miller, who left his investigative reporter position at the Los Angeles Times to do the unthinkable – teach students to think critically about the barrage of information thrown at them on the Internet — the program attracted the attention of board members like NPR CEO Vivian Schiller, CNN‘s Soledad O’Brien and Paul Mason, formerly of ABC News. Also on hand yesterday evening was The New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr., one of the evening’s co-hosts and participants in last night’s silent auction to raise money for the NLP.

Launched last spring, the NLP brings journalists from across the media world to social studies, English, and history classes in middle and high schools in New York City, Maryland, and Chicago where they teach students how to think critically and pick out reliable information from the overwhelming amount of news that bombards them every day.

Last night’s fundraiser included panels with some of the inaugural members of the program, including Anabel Rivas, a graduate of New York’s Facing History School (one of the three public schools that participated in the first NLP program), as well as Facing History’s principal Gillian Smith, Vice Principal Mark Otto and AP English teacher Kristina Wylie, whose classroom was one of the first to benefit from the News Literacy Program.

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National Public Media, the corporate sponsorship firm for NPR, PBS and Boston-based WGBH, named Stephen Moss its president and chief executive officer yesterday.

It’s a perfect time to announce the change, as NPR is coming off its pledge week and CEO Vivian Schiller just last week proclaimed that her organization had the tools to survive the recession that’s bogged down the media industry.

Moss, a former technology executive with a background in print media, joins NPM from the web technology company Evri, where he served as vice president of business development. Prior to that, Moss worked for Microsoft as VP of sales, and general manager of Bill Gates-owned Corbis. While there, he helped launch the MSN video service. Moss also previously worked as CEO of Internet ad network DoubleClick Media.

Moss started his career in advertising sales at McGraw-Hill‘s magazine publishing division, and he went on to lead sales divisions for Thompson Financial‘s American Banker and BusinessWeek in Asia. He also worked on the agency side at Seavex Limited, working with clients like BusinessWeek and CNN.

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NPR president and CEO Vivian Schiller claims she is an optimist, yet she opened her keynote address at mediabistro.com’s UGCX conference with a scary premise. “I’d like to start by really, really depressing you,” she said.

Schiller then took a moment to run quickly through some sad statistics of the media industry — statistics we know all too well. Like, for example, 11 percent of full time news jobs were cut in 2008. Or that major newspapers in San Francisco and Boston lose about $1 million a day. Ouch.

“This is pretty grim stuff,” Schiller admitted. “But we’re in the middle of such a change, an evolution or revolution in the news business.”

Schiller said she remains optimistic because new models will rise out of the ashes of the dying media business model.

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TVNewser: Dan Rather‘s $70 million lawsuit against former employer CBS Corp. has been dismissed. And in other CBS news, check out this profile of “60 Minutes” correspondent Byron Pitts, who reveals he was functionally illiterate until he was 12.

Associated Press: Gannett‘s shares jumped 18 percent in premarket trading today after the media company announced that its third quarter earnings were likely to surpass expectations. Gannett will publish its earnings October 19.

Folio: Advanstar Communications announced a restructuring, cutting its debts by $385 million.

More: A profile of Vivian Schiller, president and CEO of National Public Radio. “We have a lot of women in senior leadership,” Schiller said of NPR. “I was the first female CEO. But our head of news is a woman, our general counsel is a woman, our new senior vice president of administration and finance is a woman, our head of communication is a woman. The spirit of Cokie [Roberts] and Linda [Wertheimer] and Nina [Totenberg] and Susan [Stamberg[ very much pervades it.”

The interview we did a few weeks back with NPR president and CEO Vivian Schiller is now up on mediabistro.com. This past January Schiller left her position at the NYTimes.com, where she’d led the team responsible for the Times‘ much-admired Web overhaul, to take on what she describes as her dream job at NPR.

Schiller arrives at NPR at an interesting moment — it’s no secret newspapers are struggling to stay afloat and amidst the dramatic decline in local and international newspaper reporting, NPR, along with its 860 member stations and 38 international bureaus, is well-positioned to step in and fill in the gap.

Schiller spoke at some length about NPR’s local strength, its plans to capitalize on that, and what her long term plans are for the organization.

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Amidst daily talk about the death of news and good reporting and the demise of print newspapers being a threat to democracy as we know it NPR is thriving. WaPo is reporting that the cumulative audience for NPR‘s daily news programs hit 20.9 million people a week last year, which is a 9 percent increase over the previous year.

Surprised? Probably you shouldn’t be (our tour through cable-land last week certainly gave us an even greater appreciation). We have an soon-to-be-posted interview with new NPR CEO Vivian Schiller and during our conversation she talked a lot about local being the big play at NPR as well as the audiences devotion to the brand. And certainly as local and international reporting are increasingly cut as a result of the recession, NPR and its member stations, along with its 38 bureaus around the world (more than CNN) are well-positioned to step in and fill in the gap. And the numbers are definitely interesting.

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During an interview we just did with NPR CEO Vivian Schiller today for an upcoming ‘So What Do You Do?‘ feature, Schiller directed us to her response last week to Jack Shafer‘s piece ‘The Case Against Foundation Ownership of The New York Times‘, which we had somehow missed. In his column Shafer argues against the idea of endowment as a solution to the financial woes of newspapers. Schiller, who just last month left her post as head of NYT.com to take up as head of NPR, had this to say:

It has been surreal to follow the debate that has unfolded in recent weeks on the subject of endowing news organizations — as if this is a new idea. And, we are non-commercial and not-for-profit. NPR is supported by philanthropists, grants, corporate sponsorship, and by our member stations. (They are funded similarly, and well as by millions of listeners nationwide). Our endowment was formed in 1993 and stands at $205 million. We are the living, breathing prototype of the kind of operation David Swenson, Steve Coll, Jack Shafer and others are imagining — and imagining to be revolutionary.

So let me inject some reality into the debate! (You can read the rest of her reality check here!)