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Susan Stamberg became the first woman to anchor full-time a national nightly news broadcast in the United States when she was named a cohost of All Things Considered on National Public Radio in 1972. “She was a successful woman in journalism before it was common,” said Jack Mitchell, former NPR executive. Known for her relaxed, conversational style of interviewing, she has conducted over twenty thousand interviews with the likes of Rosa Parks, Annie Liebovitz, and James Baldwin. Novelist E. L. Doctorow once called her “the closest thing to an enlightened humanist on the radio.” Unlike other NPR colleagues, such as Cokie Roberts and Nina Totenberg, she has not worked in television journalism. Radio is the medium she prefers: “We can take you to a place in sound in a way that TV through its picture, strangely enough, can’t do.” With forty-plus years of experience, Stamberg has become a mentor to others in the profession. As producer and editor Deborah George once said of Stamberg, she “...trained hundreds in our craft... To work on a story with Susan is an education in how to think radio.”

 

Stamberg was born in Newark, New Jersey, and raised in New York City—something you can still hear in her accent. She attended Barnard College, where she earned a degree in English Literature in 1959. Shortly after graduating, she married Louis C. Stamberg and got a publishing job at New Republic magazine that she quickly considered unfulfilling. Her radio career began in the early sixties as a weather girl for a small station. She found the weather uninteresting, so she placed poems about weather at the start of her forecast. In 1963 Stamberg was inspired to work as a radio producer after she was told that a producer “is someone who doesn’t take no for an answer.” She served as program director, producer, and general manager of WAMU-FM in Washington, DC, until 1966.

 

NPR is where Stamberg made her mark in the radio world. She was hired in 1971 to edit tapes, but she began reporting for NPR News after a few weeks. By 1972 she was cohost of All Things Considered with Bob Edwards. Stamberg cohosted the show for fourteen years, until 1986. After ATC, she hosted Weekend Edition Sunday on NPR from 1987 to 1989. She has also guest hosted on Morning Edition and Weekend Edition Saturday and is now thought of as one of the most popular radio broadcasters on the air. Stamberg was given credit for helping to increase the prominence of NPR in the seventies and making ATC one of the best news broadcasts on radio.

 

Her interviewing skills are what she is best known for. A “natural schmoozer,” her style is friendly and can make interviewees immediately feel like friends. Her rules are simple: “Talk always begins with a question. Then comes the most important part: listening. Listen for what’s said and not said, listening for the silences, the cracks between the words, the hesitations, the contradictions, the glorious expositions.” She knows how to put people at ease, which makes it easier to ask meaningful questions—like when she questioned Ernest Hemingway’s widow Mary about his suicide. Stamberg works to find an interesting story in any interview she does and has discovered that feelings and conflicts are the important aspects in news stories she works on. Culture and artists have special appeal for her, something she attributes to living in New York City. Stamberg has also written best-selling books, including Talk: NPR’s Susan Stamberg Considers All Things, a compilation containing eighty-five of the thousands of interviews she has done.