Renée Loth

Journalist 

PAST EMPLOYERS: The Boston Globe; Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government 

I’m a journalist, editor and (currently) columnist for the Boston Globe. I’ve had several great assignments over my career, mostly at the Globe, including presidential campaign reporter, political editor, magazine writer, and, more recently, editor of the Globe’s editorial page. (As such I was for 9 years the highest ranking woman at the newspaper.) I’m also an adjunct lecturer at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, where I teach a course in opinion writing. I was a fellow at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center in 2011 and twice served as a judge for the Pulitzer prizes in journalism.

For 7 years until 2018, I was editor of ArchitectureBoston, the quarterly magazine of the Boston Society of Architects. The people I met and the things I learned in this role only deepened my commitment to cities and to a robust public realm. Sadly, AB was a casualty of the pandemic and no longer publishes. In fact, as I sometimes joke, I am like the Typhoid Mary of journalism, since at least 5 publications I’ve worked for have folded! (Of course, that’s more a comment on the perilous state of the industry than it is on me.) 

I grew up in the New York suburbs and came to Boston in 1970 to attend BU’s journalism school. I was just 17, the first person in my family to go to college, and I imprinted on Boston like a newborn duckling. My first job in journalism was as editor of the scrappy, shoestring East Boston Community News, a free, mostly volunteer-staffed neighborhood advocacy newspaper. Over the course of my career I’ve had bylines from 14 countries, but -- with the exception of a brief stint in Somerville -- I have never lived anywhere but one of Boston’s neighborhoods. Love that dirty water! 

I’m married to Bert Seager, a sublime jazz pianist, and we have one grown son who lives in Ecuador with his Ecuadorean wife and our 2 year-old nieto. We live in Brighton: Ward 22, precinct 13.