John Lansing, who led NPR as CEO from 2019 until earlier this year through a global pandemic, an imploding media landscape and increasing political polarization that challenged some of his journalistic principles, died Aug. 14 at his home in Eagle River, Wisconsin. He was 67.

An NPR spokesperson confirmed the death but did not give a cause of death.

Mr. Lansing, who has worked in the news business since graduating from high school, came to NPR with a mission to expand the station’s reach beyond traditional radio to media such as podcasts and newsletters.

He also announced what he considered his “North Star”: a commitment to broadening NPR’s audience and engaging a younger and more diverse demographic, along with a parallel commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion in the organization’s reporting, sources and staff.

His changes included documenting source diversity, implementing training to address unconscious bias, and hiring people of color for both on- and off-air positions.

“I felt that we needed to double down on our DEI efforts across the organization to fulfill the promise of reflecting the entire American public in terms of what America looks like,” he told Current, a magazine about public media, in 2021.

Mr. Lansing took over as NPR’s CEO in October 2019 and was still settling into his new role when the Covid pandemic struck. That presented a very different challenge: Radio listeners dropped precipitously with the shift to remote work, and NPR was running a $25 million deficit as corporations pulled back on sponsorship dollars.

Mr. Lansing was told the transition to fully remote operations would take six months; under his guidance, the process was completed within a week. He froze dues and fees for NPR’s hundreds of member stations and instituted weekly Zoom chats for all staff to maintain morale.

The economic impact of the pandemic has continued to hit the news media, including NPR, hard. To avoid layoffs, he cut the salaries of top executives, including his own, by 25 percent and later imposed a hiring freeze.

That wasn’t enough, however, and in 2023 he laid off 10 percent of NPR’s workforce – about 100 jobs – and stopped production of four podcasts. He remained in close contact with SAG-AFTRA, the union that represents the majority of NPR employees, and was praised there for his transparency and stance.

“He was the most level-headed person in the room,” Steve Inskeep, host of NPR’s “Morning Edition,” wrote in an email. “He just never lost his composure, I saw that. He was proud of his background as a practicing journalist and brought that experience to his job as an executive.”

NPR’s difficulties were not just economic. As the nation’s premier public broadcaster, it became a lightning rod during and after the Trump administration, and Mr. Lansing emerged as the organization’s chief advocate.

He loudly defended Mary Louise Kelly, a host of “All Things Considered,” in 2020 after Secretary of State Mike Pompeo accused her of lying to him in an interview. And after Twitter labeled NPR a “government-affiliated media organization” in 2023, he halted all new posts on the platform’s 52 feeds. (NPR receives less than 1 percent of its budget from federal funding.)

“It would be a disservice to the serious work all of you are doing here to continue to share it on a platform that conflates the Federal Charter for Public Media with an abandonment of editorial independence or editorial standards,” he wrote in a memo to NPR staff.

In September, Lansing announced he was stepping down as CEO but would stay on until a successor was found. His last day on the job was March 22, three days before Katherine Maher, the new CEO, took over.

Less than a month later, Lansing made headlines again after Uri Berliner, a senior editor at NPR, wrote an article for The Free Press, a Substack publication, that criticized Lansing for, among other things, a decline in “diversity of opinion,” despite Lansing’s outspokenness on issues such as race and identity.

Mr. Lansing refused to give in.

“The philosophy is: Do you want to serve all of America and make sure it sounds like all of America, or not?” he told NPR in response to Mr. Berliner’s article. “I would welcome the counterargument.”

John Francis Lansing was born on July 31, 1957, in Minneapolis. His father, William, was in sales and his mother, Catherine Ann (Cavanaugh) Lansing, was an administrative assistant. When John was 5 years old, his family moved to St. Louis and later to Paducah, Kentucky.

Two days after graduating from high school, he got a job at a local television station. He was hired as a studio technician for minimum wage; his first job was painting the station’s exterior.

He soon rose to the position of cameraman and then took on increasingly senior positions at stations throughout the Midwest, including in Louisville, Kentucky, Grand Rapids, Michigan, Minneapolis and Chicago.

While in Louisville, he enrolled at Bellarmine University, but dropped out just a few credits short of graduating in 1985. Decades later, he returned and received a bachelor’s degree in communications in 2009.

Mr. Lansing married Jean Rausch in 1993. She is survived by him and their children, Alex, Jackson, Jennifer and Nicholas.

Mr. Lansing served as an executive at EW Scripps for approximately 20 years, first as head of local stations and then as president of the Scripps Network, where he was responsible for cable channels such as Food Network and HGTV.

In 2015, he took over as chairman of the Broadcast Board of Governors (now the US Agency for Global Media), which oversees government-supported media such as Voice of America and Radio Free Asia, where he remained until 2019, when he moved to NPR.

When an NPR reporter asked him in 2022 what his impression was when he arrived, he replied, “I thought, wow. How cool is it to be at NPR?”