Alumni Portrait: Radio Correspondent Jason Margolis

Jason Margolis puts a lot of stock in serendipity. The 2000 graduate of the School of Journalism travels the globe as a correspondent for Public Radio International’s The World, and he says luck, timing and a willingness to roll with changes got him there.

After he graduated from UCLA with a degree in history, the San Francisco native wasn’t sure what he wanted to do with his life. He thought about being a teacher, worked a corporate job and washed dishes in Lake Tahoe.

And then he landed a job as a researcher for CBS Sports helping cover the 1998 Winter Olympics in Nagano, Japan. That’s where he fell in love with journalism. “I love history, and it’s cliche, but reporters are the first recorders of history,” Margolis said.

At Berkeley, he studied documentary film, but his summer internship took him to NPR’s national desk in Washington, D.C. Radio appealed to him, he said, because stories are like mini-documentaries, minus the visuals and the drawn-out production timelines.

Margolis spent a year and a half reporting for print outlets after graduation, but returned to radio when KQED hired him to report for its then-new Sacramento bureau. Three years later, he took a temporary job at The World, a Boston-based public radio program with a global focus and a reputation for insightful features. He’s been there ever since–based there, anyway: The job has taken him to 20 countries and 30 U.S. states.

International reporting lets him visit “bizarre places nobody else can go,” but some of his favorite stories have been ones that let him explore unfamiliar worlds in less exotic locales. He once spent a couple of days with a California lettuce farmer who had moved his operation to Mexico. As a kid from the suburbs, Margolis loved walking the fields and learning about agriculture.

And he still marvels that the job lets him pose “regular questions” to brilliant people from institutions like Berkeley and MIT. “It’s such a privilege that these people who have worked so hard to become experts in their field are giving you 15, 20 minutes of their time to explain something,” he said.

A lot has changed in radio and in his newsroom in the decade and a half since he entered the field. Margolis said the staff at The World is smaller since the recession, and reporters are expected to write print stories and shoot photos in addition to making good radio. He admires the way his show has been willing to rewrite its own rulebook as things evolve, he said: Two years ago, The World‘s editors were following what had become a rigid standard of allowing only four-and-a-half-minute features. “To the show’s credit, they’ve ripped it all up,” he said, and they now regularly air stories that stretch far longer than those on other public radio shows.

He’s seen trends come and go, he said, but great reporting still comes down to the same bedrock principle: “Tell interesting stories in an engaging way.”

And he has some advice for journalists who are just starting out.

“Don’t get discouraged,” he said. “The path we’re taking is much harder and much more rewarding than a lot of other professions.”

In a way, it’s easier to be a doctor or a lawyer, he said “not because medicine and law are easy to practice, but because the route to and through those careers is clear. But embracing uncertainty can yield big rewards. “The difficult thing and the exciting thing for journalists is the path can take you any number of ways, and I think you have to be open to change and possibilities,” he said.

By Graelyn Brashear (’17)