Meg Heckman is a journalist, author and educator focused on building a news ecosystem that is robust, diverse and equipped to serve all segments of society. She is an assistant professor at Northeastern University’s School of Journalism in Boston and a faculty affiliate of the NULab for Texts, Maps and Networks.
Meg writes regularly for a variety of publications about the intersection of gender, technology and journalism with a special focus on the experiences of female editors and publishers. Her methods include archival research, oral history, text analysis and plenty of shoe-leather reporting. She often collaborates with technologists, designers, entrepreneurs and other journalists, as well as scholars from the digital humanities, gender studies, sociology and data science.
Her recent work has appeared in USA Today, The Boston Globe, the Columbia Journalism Review, Poynter.org and the Newspaper Research Journal. She is the author of Political Godmother: Nackey Scripps Loeb and the Newspaper that Shook the Republican Party.
At Northeastern, Meg teaches a mix of graduate and undergraduate classes that support students in cultivating digitally relevant skills in verification, story craft and audience engagement. She is also the advisor for the Scope, a grant-funded, editorially independent digital magazine operated by the journalism school. In that role, Meg oversees a full-time professional editor and a team of student contributors who help tell stories of justice, hope and resilience in Boston neighborhoods. Meg continues to work as a consultant for local news organizations and conducts related research into best practices for technological innovation in rural and suburban markets.
Before coming to Northeastern in the fall of 2017, Meg was a lecturer at the University of New Hampshire where she served as a faculty fellow at the Peter T. Paul Entrepreneurship Center and taught in UNH’s journalism program. She spent more than a decade as a reporter and, later, the digital editor at the Concord (NH) Monitor, where she developed a fascination with presidential politics, a passion for local news and an appreciation for cars with four-wheel drive.
She’s a past president of the New Hampshire Press Association, has served twice as a Pulitzer juror and is an active member of the Journalism and Women Symposium and AEJMC’s Commission on the Status of Women.
Photo credit: Elizabeth Frantz