You have a founder with a real story about prices, hiring, or a supply chain that just broke, and someone on your team said, “This is perfect for NPR’s Marketplace.” So you went looking for the NPR booking desk, found a dozen NPR contact pages, and sent the pitch to one of them. Two weeks later, nothing. The problem may not be the story. The problem may be that you pitched the wrong company.
Most people searching how to get on Marketplace NPR are making that exact mistake. Marketplace is a public radio business show, and it does air on stations that carry NPR programming, but NPR does not produce it. This guide covers who does, which Marketplace show fits which story, who is on the desk as of late 2026, and a three-part test to run on any pitch before you hit send.
Marketplace is APM’s show, not NPR’s
Marketplace is produced and distributed by American Public Media. The show’s own FAQ page puts it plainly: Marketplace is part of APM, it is not NPR, and the two are separate organizations that often work together. Wikipedia’s history of the program fills in the rest. Jim Russell founded Marketplace in 1989 in Long Beach, California. The University of Southern California later acquired it, Minnesota Public Radio bought it in 2000, and APM formed in 2004 as MPR’s national production and distribution arm.
Why does the confusion persist? Because the distribution looks identical from the listener’s chair. Marketplace says its broadcast airs on more than 800 public radio stations and reaches more than 12 million listeners a week on air, plus more than 2 million across podcasts and digital platforms. Many of those stations run Morning Edition and All Things Considered in the same daypart. To a listener in the car, it is all “NPR.” To a booking producer, it is a different building, a different newsroom, and a different inbox.
That building is in Southern California. Current reported in April 2025 that Marketplace’s Los Angeles team was leaving its downtown headquarters to share space with LAist in Pasadena, and the show also keeps bureaus in New York and Washington, D.C. The newsroom has been under financial pressure. The same Current report said Marketplace was cutting seven positions while investing in digital, and Radio Ink reported in July 2025 that APM’s parent group planned to lay off 5% to 8% of its roughly 500 staff after a $6 million funding gap tied to federal and state cuts. Fewer people on the desk means less time to decode a vague pitch. Precision matters more than it used to.
So the first rule for anyone researching how to get on Marketplace NPR is to stop treating NPR’s contact pages as the front door. Every pitch, every follow-up, and every media list entry should point at Marketplace and APM.
Which Marketplace show fits your story?
Marketplace is a family of shows, and each one wants a different kind of story. Pitching the wrong one is the second most common mistake after pitching the wrong network.
The flagship evening program, Marketplace, is hosted by Kai Ryssdal, who has held the chair since 2005. It runs on weekday afternoons and evenings and carries the day’s business and economic news with reported features and interviews. This is the show for stories that explain why a number moved and who felt it. Ryssdal also co-hosts the daily podcast Make Me Smart with Kimberly Adams, which takes a looser, conversational approach to economics and culture.
Marketplace Morning Report is the short morning program. It is built for the start of the business day, so it favors timely, compact news: what happened overnight, what markets are watching, what changed this week. Since June 8, 2026, its host has been Kimberly Adams, who is also Marketplace’s senior Washington correspondent. That matters for your pitch. A host with a Washington beat tends to bring policy into the morning conversation, so stories that connect a federal decision to a real business outcome now have an obvious home.
Marketplace Tech airs every weekday morning and, in the show’s own words, “demystifies the digital economy.” Station listings such as WGLT credit Meghan McCarty Carino as host, and Marketplace’s site lists her as a senior reporter and fill-in host on the program. Its episodes are short interviews with founders, investors, and researchers, plus a weekly tech review segment. If your story is about software, AI, platforms, or the people affected by them, start here instead of with the flagship.
The network also produces This Is Uncomfortable, hosted by Reema Khrais, which covers how money shapes people’s lives and relationships. It favors first-person stories with emotional stakes, not company news.
Choose one show per pitch. A pitch addressed to “the Marketplace team” for “any of your programs” signals that you have not listened.
Who is on the Marketplace desk in late 2026
Hosts change, and media lists go stale faster than most PR teams update them. Marketplace had a major change this year, and it is a useful case study in why you should check the masthead before every campaign.
On March 31, 2026, APM announced that David Brancaccio would leave the host chair of Marketplace Morning Report after 13 years. His final week as host ran April 6 to 10. He did not leave the company. APM named him a special correspondent covering how economic decisions made today shape long-term futures, and Marketplace’s site now lists him as its “Future Effects correspondent.” Correspondents Sabri Ben-Achour and Amy Scott filled the morning chair on an interim basis. On May 7, 2026, Current reported that Kimberly Adams had been named the permanent host, starting June 8. Neal Scarbrough, Marketplace’s vice president and general manager, called her a “ground-breaking, multiplatform correspondent and host.”
Look at what that one transition did to a typical media list. Any pitch addressed to Brancaccio as morning host after April went to a correspondent with a new, long-horizon beat. Any pitch built around his interview style missed Adams’s Washington focus. And any list that still treated Make Me Smart as Adams’s main show missed that she now anchors a daily broadcast too. The outcome for a sloppy list: a well-crafted pitch sent to the wrong person for the wrong show.
The correspondent bench is where many stories start, because reported segments need sources. Marketplace’s author pages show what each reporter covers and how recently they have filed. Nova Safo, for example, is a correspondent focused on macroeconomics and business and economic policy who appears on Marketplace Morning Report and guest co-hosts Make Me Smart. In August and September 2026 alone, his bylines ranged from employer health plan costs to bookstore sales to Arctic shipping routes. Reading two weeks of a reporter’s work tells you more about what they will take than any database entry.
Run the Number, Neighbor, Next Test before you pitch
Marketplace’s whole editorial identity is explaining the economy through numbers and the people those numbers touch. So a pitch that works there usually passes three checks. Call it the Number, Neighbor, Next Test. Run it on your draft before it goes anywhere, and if any check fails, fix the pitch or hold it.
The Number check asks whether your pitch leads with a specific figure that moved. Not “costs are rising” but “our supplier raised resin prices 14% in September.” Not “hiring is tough” but “we posted six warehouse roles and got 40 applicants, down from 300 last year.” The figure has to be yours, sourced, and recent. If your story has no number, it is probably a profile, and Marketplace does few of those. A pitch fails this check if the only number in it is the company’s funding round.
The Neighbor check asks whether a real person outside your company feels the number, and whether that person will talk on tape. Marketplace stories land on workers, customers, suppliers, and small business owners. A founder explaining a price increase is a source. A shop owner who absorbed that increase and cut a shift is a story. Your pitch passes when you can name a second voice, with permission, who is not on your payroll. Radio needs voices, so a pitch that offers only a spokesperson and a PDF fails here.
The Next check asks what happens next, and why the listener should care this week. Marketplace runs on a daily news cycle. Tie your number to something on the calendar: a jobs report, a Fed meeting, a tariff deadline, an earnings date, a policy change taking effect. A pitch passes when you can finish the sentence “this matters now because…” with a date. It fails when the honest answer is “whenever you have room.”
Score each check as a pass or a fail. Three passes, and you have a Marketplace pitch. Two passes, and you have a pitch for Make Me Smart or a correspondent’s background file, so say so in your note. One or zero, and you have a press release, which belongs somewhere else.
The test also tells you which show to pick. A strong Number with a Next date in the coming days points to Marketplace Morning Report. A strong Neighbor with a story that explains a trend points to the evening flagship. A strong Number about a tech platform points to Marketplace Tech.
Send the pitch where it gets read
Most advice on how to get on Marketplace NPR stops at the pitch itself, but delivery matters too. Marketplace does not publish a public pitch email for its shows. Its FAQ says to contact a specific show through that show’s page at marketplace.org/shows, and to email the general inbox for anything else, where staff route messages to the right team. Each show page carries a “Talk to us” form. Use the form for the show you chose, and keep the message short enough to read on a phone: the number in the first sentence, the neighbor in the second, the date in the third, and your contact details last.
For reported stories, the stronger route is often a correspondent. Find the reporter who covered your topic most recently on marketplace.org, read their last few pieces, and write to them about how your number extends or challenges what they reported. Reference the specific story by headline and date. That one line proves you listen, and it is the line most pitches skip.
Timing follows the shows. Morning Report stories need lead time before the business day, so pitch the day before a scheduled data release, not the morning of. Evening features take longer to report, so pitch a week or more ahead of the calendar hook. Follow up once, after three or four business days, with a new fact rather than a nudge.
Keep your list current. The Brancaccio and Adams transition shows how fast a masthead shifts, and a journalist list that tracks bylines, beats, and show assignments saves you from sending April’s pitch to June’s host. If you are building that list from scratch, the Instant Press journalist list is one place to start, but check every name against the show page before you send.
The next time someone on your team says “pitch it to NPR’s Marketplace,” you will know to pitch APM, pick one show, and lead with the number.