Bill Siemering

William Siemering, left Developing Radio Partners at the end of 2017. He is currently Senior Fellow with the Wyncote Foundation.

Through DRP, Siemering has worked with independent radio stations in countries ranging from Mongolia to Sierra Leone. In the latter, DRP partnered with Search for Common Ground and others to help develop independent media in a country devastated by a 10-year civil war. In turn, the Independent Radio Network played a major role in an exceptionally transparent and peaceful national election in 2007. Recent efforts include projects on best practices for agriculture in response to climate change in Cameroon, Cape Verde, Rwanda and Zambia, and on youth and reproductive health in Malawi.

In 2003, William Siemering founded the nonprofit Developing Radio Partners (DRP) with the expressed purpose of using radio to improve the flow of information to those who need it the most and are the hardest to reach. To achieve this, DRP works with local radio stations that have independent voices and explicit development objectives.

That same year, Siemering received the prestigious MacArthur Foundation Fellowship. Money was tight during this period so this funding provided key support for him to do further work in developing community radio for emerging democracies. He returned to South Africa the following year, this time with the Open Society Foundation for South Africa, and in 1995 as a Knight International Journalism Fellow. Siemering continued his collaboration with the Open Society Institute through 2003 with projects in several eastern European countries, Mongolia, Mozambique as well as South Africa. These efforts included developing guidelines for funding and capacity building, including organizing training programs, attendance at professional conferences and visits to radio stations in the United States.

William Siemering's first international foray came at the behest of the U.S. State Department. In 1993, he was invited to meet with two groups. The first was interested in reforming the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC), which, until then, had been the mouthpiece of the Apartheid government. The second was interested in starting community radio stations as part of the liberation struggle.

William Siemering incorporated music, sound and compelling storytelling into radio programming since his days at WBFO and also played a key role in crafting NPR's distinctive sound. He further nurtured the medium's possibilities when he served as the first executive producer of (1987-1992) and driving force behind Soundprint. Originally conceived by documentarians Jay Allison and Larry Massat, Soundprint is a weekly series of independently produced radio documentaries produced at WJHU-FM in Baltimore and aired on NPR stations. It's the longest-running documentary series in public radio, and has won numerous national and international awards.

In 1978, WHYY-FM (then known as WUHY-FM) was an underperforming public radio station with one of the largest potential audiences in the country. As its new station manager (later retitled as the Vice President for Radio), William Siemering oversaw the sustained growth of the station's audience and operations, the expansion of its news staff and the development of its programming. He helped develop a successful local show, Fresh Air, hosted by Terry Gross, into the third most listened program on NPR and created Radio Times with Marty Moss-Coanne. Siemering left WHYY in 1987.

Far from formulaic, All Things Considered experienced more than its share of stumbles and missteps. The program, however, began to gel after Jack W. Mitchell assumed the day-to-day responsibilities of running the program. Its voice also developed, most notably with the addition of Susan Stamberg as co-host. After a rocky first year, All Things Considered achieved credibility and won recognition, including the Peabody Award in 1972. Nonetheless, Don Quayle, presumably dissatisfied with Siemering's personnel practices and management style, fired him that December.

As NPR's first director of programming, Siemering was entrusted with developing the distinctive daily program that would help define the fledgling organization. Informed by his experience with This is Radio! at WBFO, he wanted a flexible magazine format that would mix news, art and culture in a fashion that would be engaging, creative and conversational. It would "reflect the diversity of America and let the country hear itself." The program, All Things Considered, debuted on May 3, 1971. It opened with the quiet, conversational and unscripted voice of its first host, Robert Conley, followed by a first-person account of heroin addiction, an interview with an enterprising barber in Iowa, and a dramatic and evocative 20-minute sound montage of the massive anti-war demonstration that gripped Washington, D.C., earlier that day.

The politicization of the campus community during the Vietnam War increased the focus on the news at WBFO. This came to a head in during the student strike of March 1970. Protestors occupied the student center, police stormed the campus and tear gas was in the air. Nobody was talking to each other, but Warren Bennis, a vice president at the university, used an open mike from the station to start a dialog. Live coverage continued well into the night, during which WBFO interviewed student radicals, campus administrators, city officials and the police. "The idea," Siemering reported, "was that there is not a single truth here."

In late 1969, Siemering joined Joe Gwathmey of KUT, Benard Mayes of KQED, Karl Schmidt of WHA and five other educational radio station managers to comprise the founding board of directors for National Public Radio (NPR). They decided that public radio needed a distinctive daily program that would attract audiences and provide the new network with a unique identity. The board assigned the task of writing the Mission and Goals statement, the National Public Radio Purposes, to William Siemering. Parts of this statement were later read to Don Quayle during his interview to become NPR's first president. When asked if he could implement it, Quayle responded, "Yes, if I can hire the man who wrote it."

Broadcasting in the United States was dominated by three commercial networks during most of the 20th century, but this landscape changed with the passing of The Public Broadcasting Act of 1967 and the creation of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB). By providing financial assistance to producers of educational programming through the CPB, the act enabled them to provide both diversity and excellence to a wider audience. Originally conceived exclusively for public television, the act also called for the creation of public radio.

In 1963, William Siemering became the first professional general manager of WBFO, the student radio station at the State University of New York (SUNY) at Buffalo. He was hired by Richard Siggelkow, a former faculty member at UW, who was now the Dean of Students. Siggelkow protected the journalistic integrity of the station and gave the new manager total freedom to transform it. Like most college radio stations at the time, WBFO had been a student club limited to evening hours during the academic year. By the end of Siemerling's eight-year tenure, however, the station had substantially expanded its hours of operations and the professionalism of its staff. Howard Arenstein, Ira Flatow, Clifford Stoll and Henry Tenenbaum are among WBFO's notable alums.

William Siemering's tenure at WBFO was also marked by an extraordinary outreach to Buffalo's African-American community. Shortly upon his arrival in 1963, Siemering canvassed the community and produced a radio series titled To be Negro, but the riots that followed the assassination of Martin Luther King in 1968 prompted a different approach. After meetings during which blacks aired their grievances regarding the Media, Siemering established a satellite station in the heart of the city. Volunteers from the community—none of whom with prior experience in radio—planned and produced 28 hours of programming for WBFO that ranged from a children's program to one on avant-garde jazz, as well as community discussions ranging from school busing to drug addiction. A number of the staff went on to successful careers in commercial radio and TV.

WBFO's programming became increasingly experimental and innovative during the late 1960s. It broadcast live events from a major arts festival, readings by local and visiting artists, and a program where art students discussed their creative process. One of the more remarkable experiments was City Links: Buffalo, 28-hour-long live performance piece by Maryann Amacher in which she mixed ambient sounds transmitted from five city locations.

William H. Siemering (born October 26, 1934) is a radio innovator and advocate. He was a member of the founding board of NPR and the author of its original "mission statement," the National Public Radio Purposes. As NPR's first director of programming Siemering helped shaped its flagship program All Things Considered into an influential and enduring fixture of American media. After a decades-long career in public radio, Siemering embarked on a second career of nurturing independent radio in the developing world.