Margaret Low Smith
Vice President for Programming
Margaret Low Smith is NPR's Vice President for Programming, primarily overseeing program acquisitions, program evaluation and development.
Smith is responsible for green-lighting all NPR program distribution deals, and oversees the network's relationship with more than a dozen acquired shows, from Car Talk to Fresh Air. Her job is to determine why a show should be an NPR show and to find the best shows, which are thoroughly engaging and smart, in some cases very funny, always editorially rigorous and aesthetically brilliant.
Smith also oversees NPR's weekly quiz show Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me!, Smith was instrumental in changing the program from a studio-based show to a program taped each week before a live audience. That change contributed to 40 percent growth in audience in the past two years and a 2008 Peabody Award. She also manages NPR's Worldwide Service and the network's two channels on Sirius Satellite Radio. She led the launch of NPR's service on Sirius in 2002.
Smith's career began in 1982 as a production assistant for NPR's Morning Edition. In 1985, she joined KRON-TV in San Francisco as a news writer. For her work there, she was awarded the Associated Press' Mark Twain Award for Best News Writing in 1987.
In 1989, Smith returned to NPR and spent the next 10 years as a producer for NPR's All Things Considered. Her achievements include sharing a 1994-95 Alfred I. DuPont-Columbia University Silver Baton Award for "Changing of the Guard: The Republican Revolution," awarded to NPR for its coverage of the first 100 days of the 104th Congress. Smith also produced "The Mentally Ill Homeless," a series of interviews on the streets of New York with All Things Considered host Robert Siegel, for which she received the 1991 National Mental Health Association Award; and "Born Drunk", a Morning Edition series which won the 1990 Gabriel Award and the 1990 Bronze Health Journalism Award.
Among Smith's other notable productions are NPR's live election coverage in 1998 and the two-part series for All Things Considered, "Murder, Punishment and Parole in Alabama" with host Robert Siegel, for which she won the American Bar Association's Silver Gavel Award.
Smith and her husband have two teenage sons and live in Rockville, Maryland. She is a triathlete, a gourmet cook and a Scrabble enthusiast.
