Marketplace Celebrates 20th Anniversary
Contact: Brad Robideau
(651) 290-1113
brobideau@americanpublicmedia.org
www.americanpublicmedia.org
Marketplace Celebrates 20th Anniversary
(Los Angeles, Calif.) January 6, 2009—Marketplace,® public radio's award-winning daily business and economics news program "for the rest of us," is celebrating 20 years of broadcasting.
Marketplace premiered on the first Monday of 1989 and continues to be the fresh sound of business and economics news that listeners from Main Street to Wall Street count on to understand how business and the economy are shaping their world, country, communities and lives. Marketplace launched in January 1989 with 663,000 listeners on 80 public radio stations. Since then, it has expanded to three programs (Marketplace, Marketplace Money® and Marketplace Morning Report®) that reach more than 8 million listeners each week, more than any other business program in the United States on radio, cable or network television.
Marketplace attracts listeners with a distinctive reporting style that is fast, forthright, and friendly, making money, business and the global economy understandable and even fun.
The programs are more valuable than ever in the current financial crisis. With 20 years of accumulated reporting expertise, Marketplace has covered the crisis with depth, insight and commitment unmatched by any broadcast news organization. Marketplace is telling this story in many ways, but mostly with a human perspective, to help people make sense of the economy they know and the markets they hear about.
"When a few colleagues and I hunkered down in a suburban LA strip mall a little over 20 years ago to create Marketplace, we weren't sure we'd even survive the first year," said Marketplace Executive Producer J.J. Yore. "Now, as we enter our third decade in the midst of the greatest economic crisis in generations, it seems the mission of Marketplace is more important than ever: to help Americans understand the global economy in an accessible way to help them take charge of their lives."
The world-class reporting staff at Marketplace has won every major award in broadcasting, including the Peabody Award for Excellence in Broadcasting and Cable and the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia Journalism Silver Baton. Marketplace benefits from the creativity, experience and international perspectives of a dedicated team of journalists, including hosts Kai Ryssdal, (Marketplace); Tess Vigeland (Marketplace Money); and Scott Jagow and Steve Chiotakis (Marketplace Morning Report).
Marketplace is the only national business news program originating from the West Coast. Marketplace began on January 2, 1989, as a scrappy start-up radio program housed in a Los Angeles strip mall. The staff used single-lined phones and a make-shift studio with a door that wouldn't close. Today, Marketplace broadcasts from American Public Media's™ Frank Stanton Studios in downtown Los Angeles and has bureaus in New York; Washington, DC; London; and Shanghai. Marketplace also has desks that specialize in covering subject areas. These include an Innovation Desk at North Carolina Public Radio, in Chapel Hill, NC; an Entrepreneurship Desk based at Oregon Public Broadcasting in Portland; and the America's Desk, based at WLRN in Miami. As part of its mission to help Americans understand the global economy and the impact of globalization on their lives, Marketplace has taken the program on the road to numerous domestic and international destinations, including Shanghai and Chonqing, China; Cairo; Dubai, Cuba, Missouri and other locations.
For 20 years, Marketplace has been the place to go for smart entertaining news about money, business and economics. Now, the economic challenges here and around the world make Marketplace more relevant than ever.