Stephanie Hughes

Senior Reporter

Stephanie Hughes is a senior reporter at Marketplace. She’s focused on education and the economy, and is based in Baltimore.

She's reported on topics including the effectiveness of technology used by schools to prevent violence, startups that translate global climate data for homebuyers, and why theater majors are getting jobs writing for chatbots.

Previously, she worked as a producer for Bloomberg, where she covered finance, technology, and economics. Before that, she worked as the senior producer for “Maryland Morning,” broadcast on WYPR, the NPR affiliate in Baltimore. She’s also reported for other media outlets, including NPR’s “Morning Edition,” “All Things Considered,” “The Takeaway,” and Salon.

At WYPR, she helped produce the year-long, multi-platform series “The Lines Between Us,” which won a 2014 duPont-Columbia Award. She’s also interested in using crowdsourcing to create online projects, such as this interactive map of flags around Maryland, made from listener contributions.

A native of southern Delaware, Stephanie graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a degree in communications, studying at the Annenberg School. Before she found her way to radio, she worked in the children’s division of the publishing house Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.

Latest from Stephanie Hughes

Feb 15, 2019
What internet search is like behind China’s Great Firewall
This week, activist shareholders in Alphabet, the parent company of Google, spoke out against development of Google’s Dragonfly. That’s the internal code name for a project reportedly working on a censored search engine for China. We hear a lot about web censorship in China, but how does it work? What’s it like to use? Host Jed Kim talks with Marketplace correspondent Jennifer Pak about it. Now based in Shanghai, Pak has reported from inside China for years. She says censorship is getting stronger. Today’s show is sponsored by Nulab and Indeed.
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Feb 14, 2019
A major trade sticking point between the U.S. and China has deep roots
This week, trade talks continue between the United States and China. U.S. officials complain that China has long failed to protect U.S. intellectual property rights, a charge China rejects. The U.S. wants China to put an end to what’s known as “forced technology transfers.” That’s when U.S. companies have to share their valuable tech secrets with local partners in order to access China’s much-coveted market. Finding a solution has been a big sticking point in trade negotiations. And the history of countries sparring over IP issues goes back centuries. Marketplace’s Tracey Samuelson talks with Greg Clark, a professor of economics at the University of California, Davis. He says, in its infancy, the United States took advantage of some stolen tech. Today’s show is sponsored by Topo Athletic, WellFrame and Indeed.
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Feb 13, 2019
In the golden age of streaming, does film history have a place?
It’s Oscar season, a time when we celebrate the history of film. But what if you want to sit down and watch some classics? That was the selling point of one streaming service, FilmStruck, that AT&T recently shuttered. FilmStruck showcased directors like Federico Fellini, Akira Kurosawa and Stanley Kubrick. It was the darling of cinephiles for the two years it existed. Given that streaming giants like Netflix and Amazon seem to be focused on making original content, could the golden age of streaming mean that film history falls through the cracks? Jed Kim talks with Ann Hornaday, a senior film critic for the Washington Post, about the death of FilmStruck and the future of classic film. Today’s show is sponsored by Pitney Bowes and Indeed.
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Feb 12, 2019
Expect a boom in the business of supersonic flight
Can we agree that flying these days is kind of the worst? It feels like the changes airlines have made are rarely in our favor. Take smaller seats, narrower aisles and baggage restrictions. Plus, consumers have lost some technological ground. When the Concorde stopped flying more than 15 years ago, we lost access to super fast flights across the ocean. Now some companies are working on ways to bring supersonic travel back for commercial flights within the next decade. They’re talking everything from Mach 1, the speed of sound, to many times faster than that. Jed Kim talks with Guy Norris, a technology editor at Aviation Week. He says at Mach 2.2, flights from New York to London would go from six hours long to just under three. He expects we’ll see companies ease into this market rather than make a space-age leap. Today’s show is sponsored by Indeed, Ultimate Software, Topo Athletic and Lenovo for Small Business.
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Feb 11, 2019
And the Oscar goes to … innovations in movie tech
Over the weekend in Beverly Hills, California, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences held its annual Scientific and Technical Oscars ceremony. These awards, handed out two weeks ahead of that “other” Oscars broadcast, are specifically for scientific and technical achievements. This year the academy honored technologies like a security system that lets production teams share raw footage or drafts over the internet without them being stolen or leaked. And, of course, there were awards for motion graphics, 3D modeling, all the things that create incredible visual worlds in the movies. The process of evaluating which technologies warrant awards is the really interesting part. Molly Wood talks with Doug Roble, a visual effects artist and chair of the committee that chooses the winners. He says a whole lot of research goes into every choice. Today’s show is sponsored by Kronos, WordPress and Indeed.
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Feb 8, 2019
Was this the week Fortnite went from video game to social network of the future?
The video game Fortnite is a cultural phenomenon that has the whole entertainment industry on notice. Last weekend it took a step toward becoming an even bigger social platform, when it held a live, in-game concert with the electronic music DJ Marshmello. A reported 10 million players watched the concert all at the same time while their virtual characters danced around in the game. There was even in-game merch to buy after the show. Molly Wood talks with Peter Rubin, a senior editor at WIRED, who wrote about the concert and how it was definitely a winner for Marshmello. Today’s show is sponsored by WellFrame and Topo Athletic.
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Feb 7, 2019
Behind every great cloud is a whole bunch of expensive computers
Paul Faith/AFP/Getty Images
As we saw in tech company earnings over the last couple of weeks, tech giants are making a lot of money in cloud computing. Amazon, Google and Microsoft rent out computer storage and computing power to smaller companies for lots of profit, and they spend a lot of money on the business themselves. “Cloud” is kind of a misleading name because it’s really a very expensive physical infrastructure on the ground, lots of powerful computers that live in huge temperature-controlled buildings called data centers. All big tech companies spend a lot on data centers for storage, computer power for artificial intelligence and to deliver services to their customers. And the business is only growing. Molly Wood talks with Rich Miller, the founder and editor of Data Center Frontier, a news site that covers cloud computing and data centers. Today’s show is sponsored by Pitney Bowes and Ultimate Software.
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Feb 6, 2019
Wisconsin may not get the high-tech jobs it expected
Andy Manis/Getty Images
In June, President Donald Trump stuck a gold-colored shovel in a Wisconsin field, breaking ground on an enormous factory for the Taiwanese tech giant Foxconn. The company negotiated nearly $4 billion in tax incentives in exchange for creating 13,000 jobs. But last week Foxconn announced a change in plans. Instead of hiring manufacturing workers to make flat-screen TVs, it would shift to research and development and engineering. A few days later, another surprise. After a talk with Trump, the company said it would go back to manufacturing. Sruthi Pinnamaneni has been following this back and forth for the podcast “Reply All.” Marketplace’s Tracey Samuelson asked her what she has heard from Mount Pleasant, the Wisconsin village where this massive plant is supposed to be built. Today’s show is sponsored by Avery Publishing, WellFrame and Evident.
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Feb 5, 2019
Yet another plan to save the media with technology
In the last week alone, digital media outlets have laid off hundreds of people. The publishers of USA Today are fighting off a takeover attempt. The Washington Post ran a Super Bowl ad about how important journalism is. But subscriptions don’t make enough money and ads are annoying, data-sucking and don’t even work most of the time. Enter tech. Jim McKelvey is the co-founder of the payments and processing giant Square. He’s got a startup called Invisibly that’s part micro-payments where you pay for individual articles and part ad tech where you, the reader, can earn free articles by trading more data. Choose to pay for no ads at all or strike a balance somewhere in the middle. McKelvey told Molly Wood the whole point is control. Today’s show is sponsored by Avery Publishing, Kronos and Lenovo for Small Business.
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Feb 4, 2019
Investors are hungry for meat-replacement technologies
Robyn Beck/AFP/Getty Images
Today the Impossible Burger 2.0 arrives in restaurants around the country. The company Impossible Foods won all kinds of “best of CES” awards at the big tech show in Las Vegas last month for creating a plant-based meat replacement that smells, tastes and looks like real beef. There’s also all kinds of science going into growing meat from real meat cells. Molly Wood speaks with Larisa Rudenko, biotechnology expert and visiting scholar in emerging technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She says climate change, animal welfare and human health are all driving huge investment in meat-replacement technologies. Today’s show is sponsored by Kronos, Pitney Bowes and Mozilla Firefox.
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Stephanie Hughes

Latest from Stephanie Hughes