John Dimsdale has spent almost 40 years in radio. As the former head of Marketplace’s Washington, D.C., bureau, he provided insightful commentary on the intersection of government and money for the entire Marketplace portfolio.
As Dimsdale notes, “Sooner or later, every story in the world comes through Washington,” and reporting on those issues is like “… going to school with all the best professors and then reporting to listeners what I found out at the end of the day … Can you believe they pay me to do that?”
Dimsdale began working for Marketplace in 1990, when he opened the D.C. bureau. The next day, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, triggering the first Gulf War, and Dimsdale has been busy ever since.
In his 20 years at Marketplace, Dimsdale has reported on two wars, the dot-com boom, the housing bust, healthcare reform and the greening of energy. His interviews with four U.S. Presidents, four Hall-of-Famers, broadcast journalist Walter Cronkite, computer scientist Sergey Brin, U.S. District Court Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson and former U.S. Vice President Hubert Humphrey stand out as favorites. Some of his greatest contributions include a series on government land-use policies and later, a series on the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste disposal site.
Before joining Marketplace, Dimsdale worked at NPR, the Pennsylvania Public Television Network, Post-Newsweek Stations and Independent Network News.
A native of Washington, D.C., and the son of a federal government employee, Dimsdale has been passionate about public policy since the Vietnam War. He holds a bachelor’s degree in International Studies from Washington College in Chestertown, Md., and a master’s degree in Broadcast Journalism from the University of Missouri in Columbia, Mo.
Dimsdale and his wife, Claire, live in the suburb of Silver Spring, Md., and when not working, he enjoys traveling, carpentry, photography, videography, swimming and home brewing.
