Meet Mark Herz, Host of GBH's Morning Edition

Light skinned man with glasses and a blue baseball hat, shown from the waist up, sitting outside with a tree and white picket fence behind him. He is wearing a dark blue button-up dress shirt with the sleeves rolled to the elbow and his arms are crossed and resting on a wooden picnic table. — Merk Herz, Host of GBH's Morning Edition

Katrina Ávila Munichiello has been the editor of EXPLORE GBH since 2023. For the past fifteen years, she has worked as a writer, editor, fact checker, and proofreader for organizations including F+W Media, World Tea News, Dotdash Meredith, and America’s Test Kitchen. Her writing has appeared in publications such as Yankee Magazine, Boston Globe Sunday Magazine, and Tea Magazine. In 2011, her first book, A Tea Reader: Living Life One Cup at a Time, was released by Tuttle Publishing. Her favorite hobbies are reading, supporting local theater, volunteering for local youth organizations, and watching every MASTERPIECE program available.

April 18, 2025

Mark Herz is the local host of GBH’s Morning Edition. A Connecticut native, Mark started his romance with journalism in his final year at Yale University where he was majoring in linguistics. He went on to earn an M.S. from the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University, where he reported from ground zero on September 11. He also spent time as a newspaper and public radio reporter in Northern Arizona. Before becoming a GBH host, he covered the pandemic and other public health stories intensively in the GBH newsroom, with a particular focus on health disparities. He was a class of 2023 fellow in the Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts Foundation’s Health Coverage Fellowship.

He has won numerous state, regional, and national awards both for reporting and interviewing. In 2011, he won a national Edward R. Murrow Award for his series “Policing the Mentally Ill.” He is also a classically trained violinist, a former college a capella singer, and his current hobbies are Indian club swinging and rucking.

What are you reading or listening to now?
I am listening to The Ezra Klein Show. I am reading Tiny Experiments: How to Live Freely in a Goal-Obsessed World by Anne-Laure Le Cunff.

Who is your role model or inspiration?
My professional inspirations are John McPhee (author and four-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, a prize he won in 1999 for Annals of the Former World) and Joan Didion (esteemed journalist and writer of essays, books, and screenplays).

Why did you become a public media journalist?
I wanted to range widely and bring great stories to life with sound and creativity, weaving together performance and story-telling.

What is one word you would use to describe your job?
Multitudinous

What story or reporting are you most proud of?
I would say the part of my Edward R. Murrow Award–winning piece that took listeners for a ride-along with a New Haven police officer who had special training to help residents with mental health issues (“Policing the Mentally Ill,” 2010) .

What are your hopes for your work at GBH going forward?
To bring more important and entertaining interviews and pieces to our audience in the morning — keeping them both informed and delighted.

Listen to Mark Herz on Morning Edition , Mondays through Friday from 5-10am. Read Mark’s stories here.