Robert Conley, the first host of NPR’s All Things Considered, died of parotid cancer Nov. 16 at his home in Virginia. He was 85. As the host who inaugurated broadcast of NPR’s afternoon newsmagazine on May 3, 1971, Conley eschewed written scripts and delivered off-the-cuff intros to stories, while maintaining an air of professionalism. During ATC’s debut, Conley filled around six minutes of airtime while producers scrambled to bring a story on Vietnam War protests to the control room.
Beginning May 6 on NPR’s All Things Considered, listeners will hear five voices from the past that may have a familiar ring. They’re a bit weathered with age but still share personal stories about navigating extraordinary twists in their lives.
NPR today announced changes to its roster of co-hosts for All Things Considered. Audie Cornish, who had been guest-hosting during Michele Norris’s leave of absence, becomes permanent co-host of the NPR newsmag. Norris will return to work next month in what NPR describes as an “expanded role” — host and special correspondent. She will produce in-depth profiles, interviews and series as well as guest-host on NPR News programs. Norris stepped out of her prominent on-air role in October 2011 to avoid any potential ethical conflict in covering the presidential race; her husband Broderick Johnson had taken a job as a senior adviser to President Obama’s re-election campaign. Cornish has been a host and reporter for NPR since 2006.
The weekend installment of NPR’s afternoon newsmagazine starts its 35th year on the air this month — and its third year of a different sound that has piqued the interest of station programmers and the network’s own staffers.
Dave Creagh, an early All Things Considered executive producer who went on to lead other programs and major-market stations throughout his influential 22-year pubradio career, died Dec. 16 at his home in Blowing Rock, N.C., following a short illness associated with treatment of a cancer diagnosed in November. He was 60. “Dave was in the vanguard of public radio pioneers who laid the foundations for a vital communications network,” said John Dimsdale, Washington bureau chief for American Public Media’s Marketplace and a former colleague at NPR. “Over his career, he established high standards for engineering, journalism, production and station management.
It was purely by chance that a team of veteran NPR journalists was working in Chengdu, the capital of China’s Sichuan province, on May 12 [2008] when the destructive force of a 7.9 magnitude earthquake, its epicenter just 50 miles away, killed some 70,000 people and left millions homeless. “You never want to feel you’re lucky to be somewhere when a huge disaster strikes,” said Andrea Hsu, the All Things Considered producer who managed advance logistics for ATC’s first weeklong broadcast from a foreign country. Hsu was one of four NPR journalists in Chengdu when the earthquake struck, turning the tiny news operation she had set up in a Sheraton hotel into the only Western broadcast news source for coverage of the disaster. After a scouting trip in February, ATC chose Chengdu as its home base for a week of special broadcasts, May 19-23, intending to introduce listeners to a region of China rarely covered in Western media. The city was more ethnically diverse than most and boasted an interesting cultural history, and local officials seemed open-minded about granting access to NPR’s journalists, Hsu recalled. Plus, the local food was really good.
