NPR released its staff composition stats after the National Association of Black Journalists questioned the network’s commitment to diversity. “I couldn’t agree more that NPR must increase the diversity of its staff–particularly in management and editorial,” NPR President Vivian Schiller wrote in an Oct. 29 letter to NABJ leaders. “I believe our diversity efforts are best served through transparency, so we are going to lay out the numbers for you.” NPR’s management pool, which NABJ expressed concern about in an earlier letter to Schiller, includes 47 staff who describe themselves as people of color; that is nearly 24 percent of 199 managers at all levels of the network.

Ward Chamberlin, one of the founders of American pubcasting, is one of four journalists who will discuss “Saving the News” Wednesday evening at Yale University, according to the New Haven Register. Chamberlin was COO of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting at its inception in 1967, and helped create PBS and NPR. Others in the panel are David Greenway, former editor of the editorial and op-ed pages of the Boston Globe; Robert Kaiser, associate editor and senior correspondent at the Washington Post; and John Yemma, editor of the Christian Science Monitor.

Voices of the Valley, a grassroots group working to create a second pubradio station in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas, has encountered a setback, reports The Brownsville Herald. Betsy Price, who had been dismissed from local NPR affiliate KMBH’s board (Current, March 16, 2009), says ESPN nabbed an AM station in Raymondville the group wanted to lease. “We came very close,” she told the paper. “We were working with a broker to get a five-year lease with one of the stations. It was looking good until (ESPN) bought it out. What we were looking at was to partner with Texas Public Radio.

Reception problems with PBS affiliate KUAC in Fairbanks, Alaska, prompted it to move from UHF Ch. 24 to VHF Ch. 9, at a cost of $1.1 million and six days off the air, according to Broadcasting & Cable. It switched in late September by undergoing rechannelization. The new Harris VHF transmitter and ERI transmission line and antenna had to be installed in a “tightly coordinated process,” B&C reported, due to Alaska’s brief period of mild weather. Climate is always a challenge in the state; currently, a message on the dual licensee’s website explains to FM radio listeners that all that static is due to the transmitter operating at reduced power because of antenna icing.

In case you missed it, zombie originator George Romero (the creatures were his creation in Night of the Living Dead) was a guest on the Halloween edition of NPR fave Wait Wait … Don’t Tell Me! He shared this interesting factoid: Romero got his start working with Fred Rogers on the Mister Rogers episode, “Let’s Talk About Going to the Hospital,” in which a little girl gets a tonsillectomy.

The books that inspired Clifford the Big Red Dog on PBS, now in its ninth season, were born of desperation in 1963, according to an interview with 81-year-old author Norman Bridwell in the Seattle Times. A woman whose job it was to read unsolicited manuscripts–known as the “slush pile”–at Harper & Row, knew that publisher would not be interested in it. But she “put it in her purse without telling anyone” and took it to Scholastic, Bridwell recalled. “I was just trying to find work,” he said. “I’d been out of work and had a brand new baby daughter who wasn’t sleeping through the night and my mother was visiting from Indiana.

An episode of Sid the Science Kid explaining flu shots prompted letters to the PBS ombudsman this week. Michael Getler shares them and his take on the matter in his new Mailbag column.

KCET head programmer Bohdan Zachary shares his colleagues’ Halloween decoration of this very, very lapsed station member in his latest blog entry. Spooky indeed. Zachary also reminisces about the creepiest soap opera ever, Dark Shadows, and his attempt to contact a dead grade-school classmate using a seance inspired by the gothic show. Spoiler alert: It didn’t work.

UNC-TV used PBS’s Explorer branding identity (Current, June 23, 2009) to create its own new Explorer Channel, offering travel, culture, science, nature, history and outdoor programming. In announcing the channel, the station said it’s in response “to a demonstrated need for diverse public television programming for adults, including daytime programming.” PBS execs continue to draw attention to the Explorer concept. At this month’s Round Robin in Baltimore, PBS programming head John Wilson spoke of ongoing focus the branding, as well as using it to draw in desired audiences such as the 40- to 64-year-old “femographic.”

KCTS 9 in Seattle just received a $100,000 award from the Kresge Foundation’s Green Building Initiative to renovate its 23-year-old facility to LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) specifications. The station was one of seven organizations chosen from among 114 nationwide. The Kresge Foundation’s headquarters in Troy, Mich., is a Platinum LEED building, the highest rating of the standard (plus, it looks pretty cool).

StoryCorps is gearing up for its second annual National Day of Listening, to be celebrated Nov. 27, the day after Thanksgiving. The event, an extension of the StoryCorps oral history project that has now collected personal interviews of more than 50,000 individuals, invites public radio listeners to record a meaningful conversation with a loved one and preserve it as a piece of family history. “The National Day of Listening, which coincides with Black Friday–traditionally the largest shopping day of the year–proves that simply listening to one another is the least expensive and most meaningful gift we can give,” said Dave Isay, StoryCorps founder and president.

CPB’s big America at a Crossroads initiative funded 20 independently produced documentaries on aspects of the post-9/11 world, at a cost not wildly above the predicted $20 million. [This list tracks the 21 grants to producers and the resulting 20 broadcasts. See also Current‘s related 2009 article and timeline.] The funding Costs of the project’s major phases: $2,520,724 — for R&D on proposals from 36 producing teams, the first cut in the grantmaking process, + 12, 629,507 — for production of the final 20 selected projects, and + 5,644,158 — for WETA’s work as “Crossroads entry station” including packaging and promotion of the series and outreach efforts.

Debra Tica Sanchez is moving from the Association of Public Television Stations to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, according to CPB. As of December, Sanchez will be senior vice president for education services. At APTS, Sanchez had served as v.p. of government relations. Also, CPB’s Susan Zelman will be s.v.p., chief advisor and system consultant for education policy; previously she had been s.v.p. of education and children’s content.

PBS affiliate KCTS in Seattle has been busy this month, hosting two live debates between candidates for county executive and mayor. Station spokesperson Daphne Adair told Current this was the first time a wireless network was set up in the studio specifically to allow other local media to blog live from the set. NPR stations KPLU and KUOW along with the Seattle Times were partners in coverage. (Photo: In the KCTS control room during a debate, courtesy of the station.)

FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski announced an agency-wide initiative examining how the commission should revise its policies to ensure a “vibrant media landscape.” Steven Waldman, a veteran print journalist who founded Beliefnet.com, will lead the study as a senior advisor to the chairman. Genachowski unveiled the initiative as a response to media reform recommendations developed by the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy, the Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism, and the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism. “A strong consensus has developed that we’re at a pivotal moment in the history of the media and communications, because of game-changing new technologies as well as the economic downturn,” Genachowski said in a news release.