The Difference Engine names Emmy and Peabody award-winning Deborah Clark as its first senior fellow

Tempe, Ariz., April 15, 2021 – The Difference Engine: An ASU Center for the Future of Equality is pleased to announce that former public media executive Deborah Clark will serve as the center’s first senior non-resident fellow.

Most recently, Clark was the general manager of American Public Media’s (APM) Marketplace, the nonprofit news organization that includes Marketplace, Marketplace Morning Report and Marketplace Tech, as well as several podcasts such as “Make Me Smart” and “The Uncertain Hour.” Clark oversaw Marketplace’s transformation from radio to multi-platform media in its mission to raise the economic intelligence of the country. Marketplace is the biggest TV or radio program about business and the economy in the US.

“Deborah’s passion for helping people learn to decode the economy and understand its powerful role in all aspects of their lives is part of a lifelong interest in issues of economic inequality,” said Ehsan Zaffar, executive director of The Difference Engine and ASU professor of practice.

“Since leaving Marketplace last year, Deborah has been digging into the nexus of democracy, economic inequality and storytelling,” Zaffar added. “She will continue this work as a senior fellow at The Difference Engine, where she will develop new tools and products to level the playing field and advance the center’s mission of finding innovative solutions to overlapping systems of inequality.”

During her tenure at Marketplace, Clark helped launch the “Wealth and Poverty Desk,” a signature area of coverage that lead to the spinoff podcast “The Uncertain Hour.”

“We launched this work in the wake of ‘Occupy Wall Street,’ when concern about the gaps between the haves and have-nots was bubbling over into the public discourse,” Clark said. “I loved being able to explain the forces behind these shifts, especially through work like our immersive project ‘York and Fig.’ Following the process of gentrification as it was happening in one of Los Angeles’ changing neighborhoods, Highland Park, made the issues come to life in a way that only great storytelling can.”

Clark has spent her career in public service media. Before moving to the business side of journalism, her career was spent making content, including as an executive producer at NPR and as senior producer for a California statewide collaboration of the four PBS television stations. She helped start “Weekend America” and the “Takeaway,” which still airs on stations across the country. She also produced an audio documentary with former Labor Secretary Robert Reich on the gig economy.

Clark has won multiple awards for her work, including the prestigious Alfred I Columbia DuPont, a Peabody and an Emmy for a collaboration with the PBS program Frontline. She holds a master’s degree in Journalism from the Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley.