Creator & Host of "Whose Century Is It?" podcastPublic Radio International
Mary Kay Magistad is creator and host of the “Whose Century Is It?” podcast, a coproduction with PRI’s “The World,” exploring ideas, trends & twists shaping the 21st century. It’s available on iTunes, most podcast apps, and at pri.org/century.
Mary Kay is also a recovering foreign correspondent, having lived in and reported on East Asia for almost a quarter century. She started in Southeast Asia in 1988, reporting for NPR, The Boston Globe, The Washington Post and other media, before becoming NPR’s full-time Southeast Asia correspondent. She opened NPR’s first China bureau in 1996, and traveled and reported widely in China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and the greater East Asian region. Mary Kay did Nieman and Radcliffe Fellowships at Harvard, before returning to China as East Asia Correspondent for the BBC/Public Radio International program “The World.” In her decade in that position, 2003-13, she won several awards, including an Overseas Press Club award, a duPont-Columbia Silver Baton, and a Society of Professional Journalists award, the latter, for a series on China’s quest to become a global power in innovation, and the challenges it faces in achieving that. She is currently working on a book on that subject. Mary Kay has an MA in international relations, with a concentration in development studies, from the University of Sussex in England, completed as a Rotary Scholar, and a BS from Northwestern University in journalism and history.