William G. During his senior year, Hemmer and a friend started a radio program, playing fifteen minutes of music before classes began. He credits this time as the beginning of his interest in broadcasting.
He credits this experience with helping him land a job at CNN in Atlanta a short time later. Throughout the journey, Hemmer wrote dispatches and submitted tapes and photos for both The Cincinnati Post , a now-defunct local newspaper, and CBS's local affiliate that were assembled into several pieces collectively known as "Bill's Excellent Adventure.
In May , Hemmer played an instrumental role in the network's coverage of the Timothy McVeigh execution, reporting from Terre Haute, Indiana, where McVeigh was put to death for his part in the Oklahoma City bombing. In the summer of , Hemmer reported live from Somerset, Pennsylvania, on the mining accident that trapped nine workers for 77 hours when a wall separating their tunnel from an abandoned, flooded mine gave way, sending millions of gallons of water into their work area.
In , Hemmer traveled to Kuwait to report on escalating tensions in Iraq and remained on-site to cover Operation Iraqi Freedom when the war began. He also spent more than a month covering the crisis in Kosovo, where he reported on the aerial bombing missions from Aviano Air Base in Italy, the refugee crisis from Skopje, Macedonia, and on the latest NATO developments from Brussels.
Prior to that, he was the founding morning co-anchor of America's Newsroom. Throughout the , , and election seasons, Hemmer covered the political party conventions from their respective cities—including the Iowa Caucus and New Hampshire Primary. Hemmer was the network's lead reporter and anchor from the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newtown, Connecticut , as well as the site of the Boston Marathon bombing in April Bill Hemmer has been a regular stand-in host for Fox News Sunday, its flagship weekend interview program.
