Robert Smith
Robert Smith is a host for NPR's Planet Money where he tells stories about how the global economy is affecting our lives.
If that sounds a little dry, then you've never heard Planet Money. The team specializes in making economic reporting funny, engaging and understandable. Planet Money has been known to set economic indicators to music, use superheroes to explain central banks, and even buy a toxic asset just to figure it out.
Smith admits that he has no special background in finance or math, just a curiosity about how money works. That kind of curiosity has driven Smith for his 20 years in radio.
Before joining Planet Money, Smith was the New York correspondent for NPR. He was responsible for covering all the mayhem and beauty that makes it the greatest city on Earth. Smith reported on the rebuilding of Ground Zero, the stunning landing of US Air flight 1549 in the Hudson River and the dysfunctional world of New York politics. He specialized in features about the overlooked joys of urban living: puddles, billboards, ice cream trucks, street musicians, drunks and obsessives.
When New York was strangely quiet, Smith pitched in covering the big national stories. He traveled with presidential campaigns, tracked the recovery of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina and reported from the BP oil spill.
Before his New York City gig, Smith worked for public radio stations in Seattle (KUOW), Salt Lake City (KUER) and Portland (KBOO). He's been an editor, a host, a news director and just about any other job you can think of in broadcasting. Smith also lectures on the dark arts of radio at universities and conferences. He trains fellow reporters how to sneak humor and action into even the dullest stories on tight deadlines.
Smith started in broadcasting playing music at KPCW in his hometown of Park City, Utah. Although the low-power radio station at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, likes to claim him as its own.
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Members of the International Olympic Committee continue their tour of New York City to evaluate the city's bid for the Olympics. New York is up against Paris, London, Madrid and Moscow to host the 2012 Summer Games. NPR's Robert Smith reports.
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Spooked advertisers are steering their more controversial ads away from the Super Bowl and featuring them online. While the broadcast line-up will include family-friendly spots with patriotic themes and the Muppets, the Internet has become the destination for those seeking edgier advertising.
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NPR's Robert Smith reports on the rise of "podcasts" -- amateur music and talk shows created by the users of Apple's popular iPod personal music devices and other digital music players. Whole "shows" of music and talk can be downloaded from the Internet to individual players automatically, and some of the show hosts have become celebrities among the burgeoning podcast audience.
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Michael Chertoff, President Bush's nominee to head Homeland Security, has worked for both Republicans and Democrats. And he's been both lauded and criticized by civil libertarians. NPR's Robert Smith reports.
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Our series on popular college courses continues with a class at the Juilliard School that teaches young musicians and artists how to avoid one of their biggest fears: choking under pressure during a performance. NPR's Robert Smith reports. -
For the past 20 years, amateur cook Roger Mummert has run the multicultural Latke Festival on Long Island. This year's cooking-contest entries included Mexi-latkes, pesto latkes and Thai latkes with lemongrass, among other gourmet treats. NPR's Robert Smith reports.
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New York City's subway is one of the few underground transit systems to stay open 24 hours. That's nice for bleary-eyed revelers and late-shift workers heading home. But it's difficult for the people who clean and repair the system between trains. NPR's Robert Smith reports.
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The subway transformed the nation's largest city, and how the world viewed it. Over the decades, pop culture depictions of the subway have reflected the ever-changing image of the Big Apple. NPR's Robert Smith reports.
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Above Times Square in New York a billboard appears with just four words: "Cost of Iraq War." Below there is a rapidly increasing 12-digit number. The billboard is meant to provoke discussions about the economic impact of the war, though some are scrutinizing the number itself. NPR's Robert Smith reports.
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A federal judge rules the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act to be unconstitutional, the third such ruling since the bill was enacted. U.S. District Judge Richard Kopf of Nebraska said the law does not include an exception for the woman's health and that Congress was "unreasonable" when it ignored doctors who said the procedure is sometimes medically necessary. NPR's Robert Smith reports.
