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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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. -
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. -
A fourth man was involved in the 1965 attack on civil rights worker and minister James Reeb, but that man was never identified or charged in Reeb's murder, an NPR investigation revealed. -
The prostitutes of Freetown can't find customers. A wedding planner's shop is stuffed with dresses but couples keep delaying the big day. And the condomologist reports that business isn't booming. -
Ebola has made it harder for the prostitutes who issue a come-hither "hiss" along Lumley Beach. Customers are hard to find, pay is down, and, like everyone, the women are scared of the deadly virus. -
The southern Afghan district of Arghandab has long been a Taliban stronghold, and it took years of fighting for the Americans to reduce the insurgent threat. But with the U.S. leaving, it will be up to the Afghan security forces to maintain control. -
Thomas Jefferson's garden was a vast, beautiful science experiment involving over 300 varieties of 90 different plants. And no gardening detail was too small for Jefferson to note in the gardening journal he kept for nearly 60 years. -
Thousands of Marines have descended upon the Helmand River valley in Afghanistan, a Taliban stronghold that is known for poppy growing. The Marines plan to stay, one of the first concrete examples of the Obama administration's new strategy for Afghanistan.
