Journalism professor Meghan Irons teaches students the importance of amplifying unheard voices

BY KARA MIHM Contributing Writer

Before she became an award-winning journalist at the Boston Globe, Meghan Irons’ teenage dream was to become a teacher or writer. In joining Boston University’s journalism department this spring, Irons’ teenage self can finally tick off that second box.

Early in her education, Irons said she was always “interested in other people’s stories.”

“I was a shy student,” Irons said. “I liked to read, I used to write in my journal, write poems and things like that. So I knew it was one of those two things. So it’s funny that I had a career in journalism, and now I’m teaching.”

Joining a plethora of notable journalism professors at BU, Irons has taken on the position of associate professor of the practice of impact journalism. Through her class Reporting in Depth, she said she hopes to teach her students that journalists can “write about solutions.”

Through impact journalism, Irons said journalists stray from solely “breaking bad news,” and instead acknowledge solutions to social issues, and “ways people are coming together to fix something.”

“[Impact journalism] is a way … to convene the great minds in journalism and beyond,” Irons said. “To talk about ways and look for ways where journalists aren’t simply just exposing some bad action, but [where] journalists are bringing people together and are highlighting something that can be actionable.”

In her 20 years of writing for the Globe, one of the pieces Irons said she is most proud of focused on why the Dorchester community was “consistently in the news when it [came] to gun violence.” Through this awardwinning project “68 Blocks,” Irons and her colleagues dove into the “layers of reasons” behind the nuanced question.

Professor Brooke Williams, associate professor of the practice of computational journalism, said other students