Graham Smith
Graham Smith is a Senior Producer on NPR's Investigations team and winner of the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for audio reporting. He works with staffers, station reporters and independent journalists to dig deep and create sound-rich, long-form stories and series.
Smith came to NPR in 2003 and spent five years as Supervising Senior Producer of All Things Considered, responsible for the daily running of the show. He's field produced and reported from conflict zones for the international desk, and served as an editor on Morning Edition. He's also taught field production and radio skills to reporters making the transition to audio storytelling. Smith has recorded hosts and athletes skiing at Olympic venues, sought shrimp in the wake of Hurricane Katrina and lost his lunch flying with U.S. Marines on their controversial Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft. He has a deep love for meaningful obituaries.
Smith won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for the podcast series No Compromise, which explores an extreme faction within the gun-rights movement. He was also named a Pulitzer finalist in 2020 for his work on White Lies, an investigation into a Civil Rights era murder and what it tells us about America today.
His collaborations with Youth Radio earned him the Robert F. Kennedy and the Edward R. Murrow awards for a story on a culture of harassment at a Navy base, and the George Foster Peabody award for editing a series on teen sex trafficking in Oakland. He also received Murrow awards for his own battlefield reporting from Afghanistan, and another as part of NPR's team covering the Ebola epidemic in Sierra Leone.
Smith came to D.C. from WBUR Boston, NH Public Radio and Monitor Radio. He and family keep bees and raise crops at their little urban homestead, carving out time to walk in nature and play music.
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Three people died and nearly a dozen were injured in a deadly accident that the military initially lied about, then buried. -
In 2004, a U.S. general told the family of an Iraqi interpreter that insurgents killed their brother. The truth was more painful: He was mistakenly killed by Americans he had risked his life to help. -
A mortar blast killed two Marines in Iraq almost 20 years ago. But families weren't told for years it was "friendly fire," a tragic accident, despite regulations. Some of the wounded were never told. -
U.S. combat veteran Bryan Stern runs a nonprofit called Project Dynamo that extracts people from hostile places. Since Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the organization has rescued more than 400 people. -
Supplies are running low at Lviv's regional cancer hospital in Ukraine. The patient load has doubled and supplies in Kyiv are inaccessible. But hospital staff choose the duty of care over safety. -
The first of Ukraine's fallen soldiers are starting to come home. Two men were killed on the front lines in Russia's war on Ukraine. Hundreds gathered to mourn at their funeral on Tuesday. -
Not-so-small companies like Shake Shack and organizations like the LA Lakers were able to get loans that were meant for suffering small businesses. What happened? -
The Paycheck Protection Program is designed to help small businesses from falling off a cliff during the pandemic, but some companies on firm ground have gotten millions to expand. -
Banks handling the federal government's loan program for small businesses made more than $10 billion in fees, while thousands of small businesses were shut out of the program.
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On March 13, President Trump promised to mobilize private and public resources to respond to the coronavirus. NPR followed up on each promise and found little action had been taken.
