The co-host of a new NPR podcast on the economy grew up in Hyattsville.

The national public radio system announced recently that it has hired Adrian Ma to co-host a daily podcast called “The Indicator from Planet Money,” which aims to decode the state of the economy with “a daily dose of nerdery, banter and storytelling.”

Ma previously worked as a business reporter at WBUR in Boston and WCPN in Cleveland and has won multiple awards, including two National Edward R. Murrow Awards.

He talked with the Hyattsville Wire recently about growing up on the Route 1 corridor.

Where did you grow up? What were your favorite places to go along Route 1 as a kid?

My family moved to Hyattsville when I was about 5-years-old—so like 1990-ish? As for old Route 1 haunts, what immediately springs to mind is SOAP’S (now it’s called Laundry World, I think). I never did laundry there, but my friends and I used to go all the time to play pool and arcade games. I would love to know how much money in quarters I dunked into those machines over the years. Smoothie King was another favorite stop. My dad was a professor of entomology at the University of Maryland, so I was often on campus visiting him.

What does your new job entail? 

About a third of the time is spent reporting (looking for stories, doing research, conducting interviews, etc.), a third of my time is spent crunching all the reporting together (synthesizing findings, playing with audio, writing scripts, editing the story with colleagues) and the last third is production (recording narration/banter with my co-hosts, listening to mixes, and working with producers and editors to polish the whole thing as much as we can before we have to publish).

It looks like you worked in Boston for a while. Are you back in the D.C. area now? 

Before NPR, I worked as a business reporter for a Boston public radio station called WBUR for about three years. It was a great experience and I made some good friends there. I moved to Washington D.C. just a couple of months ago. My mom still lives in Hyattsville, and some of my best friends live in Maryland/D.C., so the best part about moving back is getting to see them all the time.

Have you been back to Hyattsville recently? If so, how has it changed? 

Since I moved back to the area, I find myself in Hyattsville quite often. Mainly, I’m there visiting my mom, but a couple of times I’ve gone to meet a friend for dinner. The variety of restaurants that have popped up in recent years in Hyattsville and adjacent areas is fantastic. When I graduated from UMD in 2007, it seemed like the predominant food options were pizza and sandwich places. Now, there’s so much more! I’m a big fan of Northwest Chinese Food in College Park. I just tried Little Miner Taco in Brentwood and that was delicious, too.

How does working on a podcast differ from broadcast radio? 

Probably the biggest thing is when I do a story for a podcast, as opposed to for the radio, I have a little more time to say the thing I’m trying to say. That doesn’t necessarily make it easier; a lot of times, it just means I have more time to agonize over how to say the thing I’m trying to say!

What was your favorite story to report?

It’s impossible to pick just one. Some stories I’m very attached to because they were just plain fun to report and write, like a piece I did about an old convenience store chain that went extinct, only to be reborn years later as a Japanese retail giant. Other stories I’m proud of because they seek to hold institutions accountable, like a piece I did on discriminatory lending. And other stories I’m fond of because reporting them gave me the chance to witness something important, like when I covered pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong or racial justice protests in Boston. I suppose what all these stories have in common is that, in reporting them, I got to meet people and learn something new. And that’s the best part of the job.

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