William Roger Witherspoon

Wm. Roger Witherspoon has spent more than 40 years working in all forms of the media as a journalist, author, educator, and public relations specialist. Along the way, he has written extensively on state and national politics, foreign affairs, finance, defense, civil rights, constitutional law, health, the environment, and energy. Most of his career has been in the news business, working as a full time reporter, editor, columnist, or producer for a variety of media companies including newspapers (The Record, N.J.; Star Ledger, N.J.; NY Daily News; Atlanta Constitution; Dallas Times Herald; and Journal News (N.Y.); television ( CNN, KNBC and NBC Network); and radio (WCBN, MI.). As a free lance writer, he has written for several publications, including Time, Newsweek, Fortune, Black Enterprise, and The Economist; and has served as a contributing editor to Essence and US Black Engineer & IT magazines. As an educator, he assembled and led a team of journalists charged with the complete restructuring of the print and broadcast curriculum and staff in the Department of Mass Communications at Clark-Atlanta University; and he has lectured on ethics and technology at the Georgia Institute of Technology; and nanotechnology in the environment, and racism in the media at the University of California, Santa Barbara. In public affairs, he was responsible for managing millions of dollars in health and environmental grant programs globally for Exxon Corp. That included development of the global Save the Tiger program; the Center for the Study of Human Factors in Complex Systems at the University of Wisconsin; and the Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Climate Change at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is the author of "Martin Luther King, Jr. to the Mountaintop," Doubleday, 1985; and co-author of "Feats and Wisdom of the Ancients," Time-Life Books, 1989; "Engineering 101: A Text Manual," Hampton University College of Science and Engineering, 1997; and the extended essay "African Americans and the Technological Society," Microsoft Encarta Africana, 1999. He is a founder of the Association of Black Journalists, forerunner of the present National Association of Black Journalists; is a member of the Board of Directors of the Society of Environmental Journalists, and a member of the International Motor Press Association, and the Automotive Press Association.