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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

  • Drones hold a lot of promise beyond delivering Amazon packages. They are already used to survey damage from hurricanes, and just this week, regulators granted a waiver to a major insurance company for “beyond visual line of sight” usage of drones to allow for more flights. What could relaxing regulations mean for businesses that want to use drones? Jed Kim talked with Miriam McNabb, editor-in-chief of DroneLife.com. He asked first about drones being deployed by businesses. (1/10/2019)

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  • People are reflected in the window of the Nasdaq MarketSite in Times Square in New York City.
    Spencer Platt/Getty Images

    Part of the Trump administration’s hard line against China is focused on intellectual property concerns. One fear is that widespread investment of Chinese money in startups gives the Chinese too much access to cutting-edge American tech innovations. That’s why legislation was passed to limit foreign investment. The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, or CFIUS, is now able to probe foreign investments in startups. And that is making investors, especially Chinese, balk. Deals are being abandoned. Silicon Valley watchers say Chinese money has pretty much stopped coming into the Valley. Marketplace’s Jed Kim talks about it with Heather Somerville, a tech reporter for Reuters, based in San Francisco. (01/08/19)

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  • When Big Tech embeds staffers in political campaigns
    Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images

    If there’s one thing that’s clear from the 2016 election, it’s that the internet and social media have a huge influence on the political process. These days if you want to run a successful campaign, you need an effective digital strategy. Fortunately for politicians, Big Tech companies like Google and Facebook provide representatives to embed within a campaign. They help navigate digital platforms and give tech support. But are those tech reps getting too much access to politicians and future leaders? We talk about it with Daniel Stevens, executive director of the Campaign for Accountability, a nonprofit watchdog group in Washington, D.C. (01/08/19)

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  • Police and private security personnel monitor security cameras at the Lower Manhattan Security Initiative on April 23, 2013 in New York City.
    John Moore/Getty Images

    Hardly anything happens these days that isn’t caught on video. Cell phones, security cameras, drones, even doorbells have cameras built in these days. All of that video would seem to be evidence galore for law enforcement, except for a few problems. First: there’s so much of it. Companies and law enforcement agencies are developing algorithms and machine learning to sift through all that video, looking for patterns or places or people. Second: that technology can have all the same biases and flaws as the people who designed it. Molly Wood talks about this with Kelly Gates, associate professor at the University of California San Diego, who’s studied the rise of forensic video evidence. (1/7/19)

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  • Sony's artificial intelligence-capable Aibo robot is on display at a 2018 CES press event in Las Vegas.
    David McNew/AFP/Getty Images

    If you live in a city with a lot of tech companies, expect that city to be pretty empty next week. That’s because tens of thousands of people are headed to Las Vegas for the annual tech trade show, CES. It’s the place where companies roll out their newest technologies, from huge televisions to gaming laptops to virtual reality gear to Wi-Fi connected plant feeders. It’s all there, but the tech industry has also changed a lot in the many years that CES has been happening. For one thing, it used to be called the Consumer Electronics Show. But the name has since officially changed to just CES. Because it’s not just all about the gadgets anymore, says Nicholas Thompson, editor-in-chief of Wired magazine. Marketplace Tech host Molly Wood talks with Thompson about what to expect at the trade show this year. (01/04/19)

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  • Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai listens during a commission meeting December 14, 2017 in Washington, DC.
    Alex Wong/Getty Images

    This week we’re looking ahead at what to expect in tech and business in 2019. Today we’re diving into tech policy and regulation. There’s the possibility of federal privacy legislation, net neutrality is still on the table, tons of state laws are in the works, and, in 2018 we saw the first big challenges around Section 230, the law that says tech platforms aren’t legally responsible for everything that gets posted on their platforms. That language in Section 230 is really crucial to the digital economy. But in 2018, Congress passed a law holding Google, Facebook and others responsible for sex trafficking posts on their sites. Molly Wood talks with Cecilia Kang, who covers tech policy for The New York Times. (01/03/19)

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  • Virgin Galactic's SpaceshipTwo takes off for a suborbital test flight of the VSS Unity on December 13, 2018, in Mojave, California. 
    GENE BLEVINS/AFP/Getty Images

    All this week, we’re looking ahead to 2019 and what’s likely to be big in business and technology. This year, expect the space economy to really take off. According to Space Angels, an investment firm that specializes in aerospace, private investment in space-related businesses has gone from a handful of companies and a couple hundred million dollars in 2009 to 375 companies and $15 billion today. The Trump administration is making space a huge economic priority, as well as a military one, creating a new Space Command in December to oversee and organize the country’s space-based operations. Kimberly Adams, a senior reporter at Marketplace and our resident space expert, says those moves are all part of an international race to space that’s got money at its core. (01/02/19)

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  • Hey, happy New Year, everyone! Welcome to Marketplace Tech 2019 edition! The future looks about the same as yesterday, right? This week, we’ve been looking at what the near future of this year might look like in business and technology. Today, we’ve got a futurist on the show to talk about the big trends that will influence tech. Amy Webb is a professor of strategic foresight at New York University’s Stern School of Business and founder of The Future Today Institute. She tells Molly Wood one big trend in 2019 and beyond is that your phone won’t be the center of your life anymore. It’ll just be the center of everything else.

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  • A picture taken on November 20, 2017 shows logos of Google displayed on computers' screens. 
    LOIC VENANCE/AFP/Getty Images

    This tech earnings season, services, gadgets, and the cloud won. Advertising … took a hit.

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  • A view of chef Peter Hoffman outside his former restaurant Savoy.
    Courtesy Peter Hoffman

    Chef and entrepreneur Peter Hoffman says there are risks he didn't take, "but there’s also the work towards coming to accept that — this is enough."

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