Ira Flatow - Years at NPR

Years At NPR

Flatow was hired by the newly-formed National Public Radio in Washington, DC in 1971 by Bill Siemering who was his former employer at WBFO in Buffalo and the first NPR program director and creator of the NPR flagship program "All Things Considered...". In Washington he covered the environment, health and medicine news, and technology stories. While at NPR, Flatow helped found the NPR science unit and served on the production team for NPR's first remote broadcast: the UN Conference On the Human Environment in Stockholm.

As producer and science correspondent from 1971 to 1986, Flatow found himself reporting from the Kennedy Space Center, Three Mile Island, Antarctica and the South Pole. A photograph of Flatow "interviewing" penguins in Antarctica in 1979 became an icon of his career. In another memorable event, Flatow took former All Things Considered host Susan Stamberg into a closet to crunch Wint-O-Green Lifesavers, proving they spark in the dark.

In 1991 he began to host the Friday edition of Talk of the Nation which became known as Science Friday. Flatow pioneered NPR's entry into the digital world becoming the first radio program to be nationally "broadcast" on the Internet in 1993 and the first to be podcast. Science Friday is also the home for the annual radio broadcast of the Ig Nobel Prize awards, heard each Friday following Thanksgiving.