Jason Beaubien, NPR Biography
Mexico City Correspondent
Jason Beaubien spent much of his childhood in Maine without a television, but he always had a radio. Late at night when he was supposed to be asleep, he'd listen to the crackly AM stations that brought in baseball games and news reports from far-off places. As one of NPR's Africa reporters from 2002-2006, Beaubien was on the other end of the broadcast equation, sending back reports from remote parts of the continent to NPR.
Beaubien is now NPR's Mexico City Correspondent, reporting from Mexico, Cuba, the Caribbean and Central America. He moved to Mexico from Kansas City, where he was NPR's Midwest Correspondent in 2007.
Before his time in the Midwest, Beaubien was based in Johannesburg, covering all of sub-Saharan Africa for NPR News. He reported from the eastern Congo on life in rebel-controlled regions. Beaubien arrived in Monrovia, Liberia, in the summer of 2003 just days before the start of a vicious rebel siege of the capital. He was arrested in Zimbabwe for showing up unannounced at the Grain Marketing Board, which has a monopoly on commercial importation and distribution of staple food commodities.
Beaubien got his start in radio as an intern at KQED in San Francisco. He later worked for WBUR in Boston.
In 2006, Beaubien was awarded a one-year Knight-Wallace Fellowship at the University of Michigan. On his fellowship, Beaubien examined issues relating to the intersection of the First and Third Worlds.
His work has won numerous national and local awards including a Casey Medal for a 13-part series on a public elementary school in Boston.
