MARGARET LOW IS HOME

Margaret Low ’76 has returned home, after 44 years. “I left when I was 17, and I was 61 when I came back,” she says. Now, as CEO and General Manager of Boston’s WBUR , one of the nation’s largest public radio stations, Low works just a few miles from where she grew up in Belmont.

“It felt like an incredible homecoming. Everything about it feels like home, even the weather,” she says. “I’m probably one of the few people who enjoy shoveling snow.”

Low started her new role in January 2020, at a critical time for our country and journalism. The job combines her experience as a senior producer of All Things Considered, and as Senior VP of news at NPR, and then as Senior VP at The Atlantic and President of AtlanticLIVE, overseeing more than 100 live events across the country.

Like journalism in general, WBUR is changing with the times, which made the job even more appealing. “It’s more than a station. It’s a modern media organization,” says Low sitting in an armchair in her spacious office at WBUR’s building in the midst of Boston University.

WBUR still offers its strong local news programming, in addition to their national shows, On Point and Here and Now. With a staff of 200, 120 of whom are editorial, WBUR has one of the largest newsrooms in New England. That size has allowed it to expand into podcasts such as Endless Thread, Circle Round, and Anything for Selina, covering topics about the internet’s vast and curious ecosystem, a show for children based on a series of books, and a podcast investigating the life and death of Selena Quintanilla.

WBUR also hosts live events such as The Moth, author readings, chef visits, musical acts, and more at CitySpace, a 270-seat theater on Commonwealth Ave.

“It’s a breath-taking space that allows us to express ourselves on stage. I am a big believer that gathering in one room to grapple with life is beneficial,” she says.

Cognoscenti, another arm of WBUR, is celebrating its 10th anniversary this year. Some of the best writing from head and heart can be found here by local writers on topics of today’s concern.

“We have to be digital,” she says. “That’s the huge transformation that’s underway.”

That wasn’t the only transformation Low oversaw. When she started, she didn’t know that six weeks later, she’d send a memo to staffers telling them about this thing, Coronavirus. Well, we all know how that played out.

Even with the pandemic, the organization is soaring, says Low.

“It was a global trauma. People felt it profoundly, but what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. We're still trying to figure a lot of it out, both in terms of how we live and how we work,” she says. Not everyone is in the office at the same time, and looking out over the large newsroom with black computer screens dotting the room, you can see just how few people are actually working in the office at the same time.

WBUR has been around for 75 years, and Low says it’s her responsibility to ensure its sustainability. She is quick to add, “One of the things that’s extraordinary about BUR is the quality of the people who are drawn to work here…It’s a small and mighty station deeply embedded in our lives,” she says.

Low says she is leading WBUR’s transformation within the context of the pandemic. “Navigating the transformation from a legacy organization to a modern media organization is not a simple or uncomplicated task,” she says.

“I’ve spent my life in national news organizations. I loved every minute in both places (NPR and The Atlantic) but it’s very different to be running a local, trusted, beloved institution where you actually really matter in a personal way in people’s lives,” she says.

“We’re a news organization, but,” she says, “we are a source of real comfort and connection. Our vision is to be a daily habit for everyone in Boston and beyond, who want to engage with the most consequential issues of our time.”

Low was struck with how supportive the public is and was during the worst of the pandemic, people continued to give, and if they couldn’t at that moment, they committed to giving later.

BY MORGAN BAKER ’76

And finally, WBUR has added ten newsletters on topics including cooking, beach books, and a news quiz.

Low is taking WBUR and launching it into something even bigger and better with Catapault, the name of the new initiative, which will look at modernizing the infrastructure, understanding the customers, defining and amplifying the WBUR brand, and building their expertise. That’s a lot, but is doable.

Just as Low wants WBUR to be welcoming and a part of listeners’ lives, she says Boston has become more welcoming also.

“I love the architecture. I love the quality of life here. I love the connection to ocean and city and country and mountains. It feels like it's the perfect spot in the universe. It's relatively small, but it feels urban. It's a much richer, more interesting, more diverse, more conscious city than it was in the city I grew up in. It also feels like a much more alive and vibrant and interesting city... and a much more welcoming city.”

Low credits BB&N with much of her success. While she didn’t work on school papers or magazines at either BB&N or the University of Michigan, she says teachers and professors at both schools influenced the direction her life would go.

“BB&N was an awakening for me. I had been in public school, hanging out, having fun, not terribly interested in academics or intellectual life, even though I came from a family that was all about that.” Her father was a physicist, her mother was a psychologist, and her older siblings had gone to Buckingham and Browne & Nichols prior to the merger. She arrived as a junior and was welcomed by the students, and loved her two years.

“The classes were small, the teachers were engaged,” she says. “Wyn Kelley was my English teacher, and I woke up in that class. She taught me how to think and how to pursue ideas, and it was just like this sort of thrilling ride. She pushed and I'd never been pushed before.”

Other influential teachers include her math teacher, Ellen Eisen, who had gone to the University of Michigan, and history teacher Charlotte Waterlow. Eisen told Low she should go to University of Michigan. “I did what she told me. I wasn't even into math, but I was into her,” says Low.

She remembers Waterlow as dancing with excitement while talking about history.

That enthusiasm infected Low.

In her 2017 commencement address to the undergraduates at the College of Communications at University of Michigan, Low told the graduating class about her “aha” moment. For the final in a class called The Film Experience that studied the styles and themes of Soviet and East European Cinema, taught by Herb Eagle, he allowed Low to make a documentary film about the emerging fitness craze. “I think I just wanted out of writing a paper,” she said to the students. Looking back, she realized that was the beginning of something important, the first glint of a potential career telling stories.

After graduation, she landed in New York where she met a woman who was making oral history documentaries for NPR. Low worked in a restaurant to pay the bills and worked on the documentaries for free. The end result was a half hour program about the labor history of New York and the birth of the AFL-CIO.

“I just fell in love with the sort of the craft. I discovered journalism and reporting through sort of documentary and oral history,” she says.

Low then got a three-week temp job at NPR which turned into a lifetime, she says. After moving to DC, she became a PA at the 1 am slot, and as they say, the rest is history. She raised her two sons, now 34 and 29, outside of DC. Her first marriage ended in 2014, and in 2021 she married Kinsey Wilson and joyfully added two stepdaughters, 34 and 28, to her family.

As CEO at WBUR she works a lot, but she understands and appreciates taking time for herself and her family and hopes to be a role model for those who work with her. She swims daily — something she’s been doing for years — skis when she can and enjoys family time.

Back in her office where she looks at home and comfortable, her phone pings, and it’s time for her to jump to the next meeting. But busy is good, and there's no place she'd rather be than where she is: home.

1: Low has relished her professional journey which has seen her come full circle to the place where it all began. 2: One of many notable moments from her career in journalism, Margaret Low with President Obama at the White House Correspondent’s Dinner in 2013 3: Margaret Low (far right on the phone) and President Clinton on the day the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke. Low, as producer of All Things Considered, and her colleagues arrived for a scheduled interview they were going to tape record. Instead, after waiting for six hours, they went live as President Clinton looked Robert Siegel in the eyes and denied having an affair with Lewinsky. Low was responsible for hitting their marks and getting on and off the air at the right time. But, she lost contact with NPR, and watched the minutes tick by on her watch to know when to end the interview.