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.).
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.
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 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.
Energy Matters 
Thanks for the interesting article on ground water migration and the degradation of safety at Salem plant. As a life long worker in the nuclear power industry I have seen many of the plants aging over the last 40 years. Some owners are aggressive about maintenance and others are not. The public shouldn’t be subject to plant owners that wait for orders from the NRC to obey the law. Ever since Ronald Reagan’s tenure in the White House the industry has pretty much dictated to the regulator how things are going to be. Cracks found it the retaining walls at Indian Point in New York are not being addressed with anything but “monitoring of leakage” and the Nuclear Energy Inistitute program for response to tritium leakage into groundwater is essentially a monitoring and notification program. It addresses minimizing new leakage, but does not require prevention of tritium migration into the environment. As a result, many nuclear plants around America are leaking tritium into the local groundwater as a normal course of continued operation. The NRC does not prevent this as they claim the tritium contamination levels are within allowable limits, but the local people were never told that this issue would have to be lived with while the licensing process was underway.
By: Joe on October 5, 2011
at 12:41 pm
Great article:
Attorney generals fight for public access in Nuclear issues
BTW: Have you noticed how the nuclear and fossil fuel industries have joined together to battle the solarazation* in the USA?
*Solarazation is the conversion to clean Solar from other more polluting and/or risky forms of energy production. (as submitted to Urban Dictionary)
By: CaptD on August 3, 2013
at 11:30 am
Roger,
Thank you for sending us here after reading the story that KSL did on my husband and family. I would love to talk with you more at length regarding FUKUSHIMA. Thank you again.
By: Summer Simmons on August 17, 2013
at 12:16 am