“We had agreed on the destination we were to arrive at, but somewhere along the line NPR wavered in the journey,” says Tavis Smiley in Time of his decision to leave NPR. He also says President Bush’s Cabinet is more diverse than his former employer.

NPR has named Steve Inskeep and Renee Montagne permanent hosts of Morning Edition.

Edie McClurg, perhaps best known for the role of the principal’s secretary in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, was “Operations Manager, News Anchor, Documentary and Fine Arts Producer for NPR affiliate KCUR-FM and National Public Radio 1966-1974,” according to the Internet Movie Database.

The Rev. Irene Elizabeth Stroud, a former assistant pastor at First United Methodist Church in Germantown, Pa., was expelled from the clergy after a jury of Methodist ministers convicted her of breaking church law by living openly as a lesbian, the Washington Post reports. Stroud’s “coming out” sermon and legal struggle were captured by The Congregation, a doc by Alan and Susan Raymond scheduled to air on PBS on Dec. 29.

Joan Ganz Cooney, creator of Sesame Street, will discuss “The Evolution and Signifiance of Sesame Street” at a Smithsonian lecture hall in Washington, D.C., Dec. 8. $20 for the general public.

Ken Freedman, station manager of freeform WFMU-FM in Jersey City, N.J., gave a State of the Station address Dec. 1. (MP3) Did he mention yellowcake?

More in the Philadelphia Daily News about Rachel Buchman, the WHYY reporter who resigned after mouthing off to a conservative group. A Daily News columnist broadens the issue: “How many of us want our tax dollars to keep funding NPR’s Rachels? Or any other ideologue?”

A Station Resource Group analysis of recent financial data from public radio stations (PDF) shows increases in listenership, underwriting revenue and listener support. Fiscal year 2003 was also the system’s strongest ever for net fundraising revenue.

Mark Handley, president of New Hampshire Public Radio, will retire next October to sail across the Pacific Ocean with his wife, reports the Concord Monitor. Handley recently finished his second term as chair of the NPR Board.

Rachel Buchman, a reporter at Philadelphia’s WHYY, resigned earlier this week after leaving a seething voice mail at the offices of Laptoplobbyist.com, a Virginia-based conservative website. The Philadelphia Inquirer reports that the group circulated Buchman’s message, which advised the org’s members that “God hates you and He wants to kill your children… You should all burn in hell,” via e-mail after it learned that she worked at WHYY. “It was a personal matter that was turned into a public issue,” Buchman said. “Rather than call my journalistic integrity into question, I decided to resign for personal reasons.” (registration req., via Romenesko)

The Supreme Court has denied the American Family Association’s request for a review of a lower-court decision that upheld the FCC’s point system. (PDF, p. 4, see “04-539.”) AFA had argued that the point system, which settles competing applications from noncommercial broadcasters for frequencies, unfairly favored pubcasters over religious broadcasters.

The New York Times covers Tavis Smiley’s departure from NPR. “We would argue that there’s more to be done, but his show was evidence that we were accomplishing it,” says David Umansky, NPR’s interim v.p. for communcations.

The Boston Globe profiles Peter Fiedler, interim g.m. at WBUR-FM.

Tavis Smiley will leave his NPR show Dec. 16. In an e-mail to stations, he appears to blame NPR for failing “to meaningfully reach out to a broad spectrum of Americans who would benefit from public radio, but simply don’t know it exists or what it offers.”

Milwaukee’s school board voted unanimously last week to outsource management of WYMS, their noncommercial station, to local nonprofit Radio For Milwaukee.