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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America — its presidents, its senators, its people — said a final goodbye to Sen. Edward Kennedy on Saturday. Mourners braved a downpour to attend the funeral Mass for the late senator at Boston's Our Lady of Perpetual Hope Basilica.
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FBI agents fanned out across northern New Jersey today and made arrests in a corruption investigation that includes two mayors. Officials say politics and religion were used to cloak crimes and enrich the suspects.
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When South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford announced this week he'd had an extramarital affair, he joined several other high-profile politicians admitting infidelities, including Eliot Spitzer, John Ensign, David Vitter and John Edwards.
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Bernard Madoff has gone from a $7 million penthouse to a tiny jail cell in Manhattan. Madoff pleaded guilty in federal court Thursday, but implicated no one but himself. Investigators continue to pore over records, trying to figure out, among other things, who helped Madoff engineer the $64 billion fraud that may be the largest in U.S. history. Madoff will be sentenced on June 16.
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The man accused of operating a Ponzi scheme is expected to plead guilty to charges he engineered one of the largest investment scams in U.S. history. Bernard Madoff faces more than 100 years in prison. Some of the victims of the multi-billion-dollar investment scheme will have their say at Thursday's plea hearing.
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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.
