Margie Mason

Notable work and positions

The Associated Press — Asia Medical and Investigative Reporter (2012– ); former Indonesia Bureau Chief and Vietnam Correspondent

Biography

Margie Mason is an American journalist for the Associated Press who has reported from more than 20 countries across four continents, based in Southeast Asia for nearly two decades. A native of Daybrook, West Virginia, she graduated from West Virginia University's Reed College of Media (then the Perley Reed School of Journalism) in 1997. She began her AP career in Charleston, West Virginia, and Jacksonville, Florida, before working at the Florida Times-Union. She joined the AP's San Francisco bureau in 1999 following an Asian Studies fellowship at the University of Hawaii, then reported from Vietnam beginning in 2000, covering the 25th anniversary of the fall of Saigon and later serving as an AP correspondent in Hanoi and acting bureau chief. She has covered global health crises including SARS, bird flu, H1N1, and drug-resistant tuberculosis, and was one of a small number of foreign journalists permitted to report from inside North Korea. In 2016, Mason and three AP colleagues won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for a series on slave labor in Southeast Asia's fishing industry that led to the rescue of more than 2,000 enslaved fishermen; the series also won the 2015 George Polk Award for Foreign Reporting and the 2016 Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting. With colleague Robin McDowell, she won the 2021 Selden Ring Award and a 2021 Gerald Loeb Award for International reporting on labor abuses in the palm oil industry. She was a 2008–2009 Nieman Fellow at Harvard University, where she studied public health.