Marco Werman

I got my first job in journalism at 16 as a copy-boy at the News and Observer in Raleigh, North Carolina. I’ve worked in documentary photography, print, radio and television. My radio work started in Burkina Faso in West Africa, following a three year stint with the Peace Corps in Togo. From Burkina Faso, I moved to London to produce the BBC World Service flagship breakfast program for Africa, “Network Africa.”

In 1990, I moved back to the US, and helped start up a new public radio station in upstate New York in the Adirondacks where I reported, produced and hosted a daily two-hour news and current affairs show. Four years later, I moved to Rome, Italy where I was the correspondent for Monitor Radio. In 1995, WGBH and The World hired me to help begin the program. Its mission — to bring international news to American ears in a compelling way that would make the world more relevant to them — scratched me where I itch. And I’ve been committed to that mission ever since.

Along the way, I’ve won some awards (the National Federation of Community Broadcasters for an original radio drama I wrote; the Sony awards for an exposé on child labor in West African gold mines; the New York Festivals for a BBC documentary on the 1987 assassination of Burkina Faso’s president; the first annual Unity award from the Radio and Television News Director’s Association for coverage of diversity issues; and an Emmy for a Frontline documentary on Libya). But the most important honor for me remains the emails I get from listeners thanking us for the coverage we give to often little-known stories and voices from around the globe.