Experience

I was first published in 2005 in the Boston Globe during a Northeastern University co-op stint (essentially a paid six-month internship) with the paper and have been writing for the media ever since.

I was inspired to try out a journalism class at Northeastern after reading a list of notable alums and realizing quite a few had graduated from the School of Journalism. Two of those alums are Walter Robinson and Dan Kennedy, who are now professors at the school (and awesome at their jobs– I took classes from both!).  My first professor, Carlene Hempel, inspired my love of journalism and her words of wisdom are just as relevant and still echo in my head a decade later.

At the end of my second year, I was awarded NU’s full-tuition Presidential Scholarship, which is given to only 12 students each year.  I graduated magna cum laude and was the top student in the journalism school’s class of 2008.

In Oct. 2008, I started regularly writing for Boston Globe’s regional West edition and since then, have learned so much under the direction of my excellent editors, Tom Coakley and Leslie Anderson. (Note, Jan. 2015: Leslie now manages all of the Globe’s regional sections while Tom has retired and is living the good life. -Megan)

I’ve written stories covering local politics, environmental concerns, crime, controversies, and human interest.

In February 2011, I was named a Knight Digital Media Center fellow and had the amazing opportunity spend an intensive week learning digital media skills at the University of California in Berkeley.

That experience inspired me to start a local news blog about my hometown, Rockland, Mass. Since Rockland is a lower income, blue-collar town, it gets scant attention from established media outlets like the Globe and Patriot Ledger even though it desperately needs more coverage.

My goals for Welcome to Rockland were to give a deeper understanding of issues facing the town like increased drug abuse and declining economic health, and to provide a launching point for greater community awareness and, ideally, involvement.

The site became defunct when I was diagnosed with Stage 3 breast cancer in Dec. 2012, but I continued writing on the blog I created, ohcrapitscancer.com.  Now that cancer treatment has ceased, I hope to relaunch Welcome to Rockland with an in-depth focus on the town’s opiate crisis using statistics and human interest stories to illustrate the full impact of addiction’s devastation on one little town.

Also, I’ve been involved in two book projects– once as a researcher and once as an author.

In 2008, I was a researcher for the Boston Globe-produced book “Ted Kennedy: Scenes from an Epic Life.”

And in 2010, I wrote a chapter for the book “Faith, Politics & Press in Our Perilous Times,” edited by Stephen Burgard.  My chapter, “Citizen Journalism and New Perspectives on Religion in the News,” is about an undergraduate reporting project I did on Massachusetts’ legalization of gay marriage, and how citizen journalism can provide more depth and understanding on complex issues.