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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Disgraced financier Bernard Madoff was in court Tuesday for a hearing on whether he is aware his lawyer has potential conflicts of interest. Madoff is expected to waive his right to a trial and plead guilty at a hearing Thursday.
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A brutal wave of drug violence is ravaging cities near the U.S.-Mexico border, and governments of both countries pointed fingers at each other this week over who's to blame.
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The Federal Aviation Administration has released audio of conversation between pilot Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger and air-traffic controllers moments before US Airways flight 1549 splashed down into the Hudson River. All 155 people onboard survived in last month's splashdown.
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Caroline Kennedy has ended her bid to win appointment to the U.S. Senate seat vacated by Hillary Clinton and once held by her late uncle, Bobby Kennedy. In a statement released early Thursday, Kennedy says she told New York Gov. David Patterson she is withdrawing for personal reasons. She was considered a favorite for the New York Senate seat, though she has never held elective office.
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It is a day of thanks and praise for the pilot and rescue workers responsible for what is being called the "Miracle on the Hudson." All 155 people aboard US Airways flight 1549 are alive after the pilot achieved a remarkable splashdown in the Hudson River.
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The National Transportation Safety Board is looking into what caused the two engines on a US Airways jetliner to fail shortly after takeoff Thursday from New York's LaGuardia Airport. The plane ditched in the Hudson River near midtown Manhattan. All 155 people aboard were quickly pulled to safety aboard rescue craft and private boats.
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Rescued passengers from US Airways Flight 1549, which crashed in the Hudson River, are being treated for hypothermia. A survivor said they had just taken off when he felt a thud, and the plane dropped down. There wasn't much time before an emergency landing, he said.
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US Airways Flight 1549 went down in a relatively shallow portion of the Hudson River. The crash site was right next to the ferry boat terminal, and the vessels could be used in the rescue efforts. A witness said everyone got off the plane alive.
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Delegates to the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minn., say Sarah Palin left them feeling energized and made her case for the vice presidency.
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As soon as Barack Obama's speech was over, scavengers got to work. More than 80,000 people had jammed Denver's football stadium to watch Obama make history by becoming the first black man to be nominated for president by a major political party. Speech-goers picked up anything they could get their hands on — political signs, plastic cups and confetti.