As a journalist, Mason's longest running association has been with
The Guardian, where he has been a staffer on the foreign and sports desks and for which he is a regular obituarist. He is also an arts critic for the
Morning Star newspaper. In the late 1980s, Mason was among a small coterie of British journalists focusing on writing about green issues. In the early 1990s, he was news editor of
Green magazine, the UK’s first publication for green consumers, and in 1999, with its former editor Alistair Townley, he co-founded
Ethical Performance, an international publication on corporate social responsibility. He was its editor and managing editor for 12 years. With
Football Factory author
John King, Mason was also co-founder of
Two Sevens small press magazine, which included one of the first ever interviews with
Irvine Welsh. Mason has written extensively on the Caribbean as well as on
reggae and
calypso. For a number of years he was a contributor to the weekly
Black Echoes music newspaper (now known as
Echoes). In 2024, Mason abridged, edited and wrote an introduction to
Charles Darwin's
The Voyage of the Beagle (1839), excising most of the scientific content to recreate the book purely as a piece of travel literature. ==Bibliography==