Michael Smith

Idea generator, Journalist, Musician, Parent, World traveler, Writer/Editor

I was born and raised in North Carolina, but have been traveling the world since I was 18. I have spent my career as a journalist, living and working from bases in the U.S., Chile and Brazil. I have reported from 20 countries on business, finance, politics, human rights, natural disasters and conflicts. I now cover Latin America for Bloomberg Markets magazine, where I specialize in long-form investigative stories about wrongdoing by corporations, governments and people. For the last nine years, I have written stories about modern-day slavery; corporate financing of destruction of the Amazon; labor abuses in the ethanol and orange juice industries; Chinese exploitation of miners in the Congo; organ trafficking in Israel, Eastern Europe and Latin America; conflicts over water; banks working for Mexican drug cartels and corruption in Argentina and Venezuela. Our stories have won more than 30 national and international journalism prizes since 2006, including the Polk, Scripps Howard, Sigma Delta Chi, Oversees Press Club and Investigative Reporters & Editors awards. This year we won the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism award for a story about a tungsten metal mine operated by FARC rebels in Colombia.