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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Once you get a satellite, you need to find a large tube filled with explosive fuel to take your satellite to space. Luckily, there is fierce competition among rocket makers to give you a lift. In the second of three-part series, Planet Money travels from California to New Zealand to see which rocket with blast their satellite to the stars.
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What happens when a country decides to sell its water then hits a drought? Our Planet Money team takes us to a country in Africa that might have given away its most valuable resource.
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Hedgehogs are starting to disappear from the English countryside, threatened by cars, garbage and even fences. But now there's a campaign to save one of England's favorite animals.
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Some controlling or coercive behavior is now a crime there. Domestic abuse could include stalking your spouse online or restricting access to family and friends. -
Same Christmas dinner as last year? You're doing it wrong. In 17th-century Britain, Christmas dinner was a lavish, experimental, 12-day drunken affair. Think Mardi Gras with snow. -
The Olympic event was all-male until 2002. Often, the "brakemen" are plucked off a land sport, like track and field. "It's not like you get a tutorial or something, or you grow up doing bobsled," says American Aja Evans. -
Olympic planners are racing to reschedule events such as the biathlon and snowboard cross because of limited visibility. -
Ole Einar Bjoerndalen is a biathlete competing for a record 13th medal — which would make him the most decorated athlete ever at the Winter Games. No one has ever been so good for so long in his sport. "He's 40 years old, and he's motivated like an 18-year-old," says one expert. -
The sport's biggest star says the slopestyle course in Sochi is too risky for him; several top athletes have already been injured. He will still compete in halfpipe, and hopes to pick up his third gold medal in the event. -
The X Games have changed the lineup and atmosphere of the Winter Olympics with the introduction of snowboarding, half-pipe and now slopestyle. But when a youth-lifestyle, punk-rock sport makes it to the Olympics, some things inevitably change.
