Jennifer Moore, GBH News’s statewide & features editor, has been tapped to lead the new Connecting the Commonwealth initiative. Public media’s mission drives her.
Jennifer grew up in rural Missouri and attended the world’s first school of journalism at the University of Missouri. As a young adult, she spent five years in the Persian Gulf region as a freelance journalist contributing to NPR and as a fixer for CNN-International. During the pandemic, she was the news director at the NPR and PBS stations in the Missouri Ozarks. She has been a contracted freelancer with The New York Times and NPR, and her reporting has earned multiple awards, including a national Edward R. Murrow Award for writing, the Excellence in Legal Journalism award from The Missouri Bar, and an Honorable Mention for the Toner Prize for Excellence in Political Reporting from Syracuse University. Her favorite places to spend time in Boston are along the Charles River, the Boston Harborwalk, and the Freedom Trail.
What are you reading or listening to now?
I just finished listening to the audiobook of Moby-Dick.
Who is your role model or inspiration?
Anyone who acts with courage — famous or not — inspires me. My daughter inspires me to be a better human.
Why is it important to you to be a public media journalist?
There’s a clarity of mission within public media that I haven’t experienced in other newsrooms. We are here to serve the public, plain and simple — and that mission is expected of us.
What is one word to describe your job?
Analytical.
Describe an impact that your journalism has produced.
We’ve received feedback from several Haitian community members who said that feature stories I assigned and edited at GBH mean a lot to them. That feedback, in turn, meant a lot to me.
What are your hopes for Connecting the Commonwealth?
I have many (high) hopes — one of which is to foster even more of the public’s trust in our local and statewide newsrooms.
