Wm. Roger Witherspoon has spent more than 50 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.)
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.
As a free lance writer, he has written for several publications, including Time, Newsweek, Fortune, Essence, Black Enterprise, The Economist, and US Black Engineer & IT, Asia-Pacific Journal, and the Huffington Post.
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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.
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 co-founder of both the Philadelphia Association of Black Journalists, which grew into the present National Association of Black Journalists -- and the New York Association of Black Journalists; and a member of the Society of Environmental Journalists, the International Motor Press Association, and the Automotive Press Association.
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