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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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.
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Former President Bill Clinton will undergo heart bypass surgery early next week, after checking into a New York hospital with chest pains. He cancelled a two-day trip with his wife, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, across upstate New York. The former president, 58, does not have a history of heart problems. NPR's Robert Smith reports.
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Speeches at the Republican Convention portray President Bush as a strong wartime leader. After Sen. John McCain made the case for war in Iraq, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani assailed Bush's opponent, Sen. John Kerry. Hear NPR's Melissa Block and NPR's Robert Smith.
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Protestors at this week's Democratic Convention have decided not to use the designated space -- better known as the "cage" -- for their actions. Instead, many are lining the path into the convention hall, singing, chanting and shouting their messages to the delegates entering the hall. NPR's Robert Smith reports that the messages from the protestors are varied, bizarre and aimed at getting the most attention.
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For the first time, writers of Web logs -- online journals of news and opinion -- have been granted journalist credentials for a political convention. Bloggers at the Democratic gathering in Boston offer a more passionate, opinionated view of goings-on than that of traditional journalists. Hear NPR's Robert Smith. -
Family members of those killed in the Sept. 11 attacks express concerns that the commission studying U.S. intelligence before Sept. 11, 2001, won't answer vital questions in its final report, due this week. NPR's Robert Smith reports.
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The first National Hip-Hop Political Convention is under way in Newark, N.J. Organizers are hoping to energize young voters and create an agenda they can take to politicians. NPR's Robert Smith reports.
