For nearly a decade, Joyce Pellino Crane has covered national news from a local perspective as a freelance correspondent for the Boston Globe, weaving information about the economy, Hurricane Katrina, politics, Iran, and Iraq into stories about Main Street.
She began writing for the Globe in 2000 as the author of the “Fast Forward” column in the Business, Innovation and Technology section. In 2002 she became a beat reporter for Globe NorthWest, covering several towns for the next seven years on every subject from town meeting to business profiles.
As a beat reporter, Crane has covered her share of environmental issues. One story she followed detailed a proposal for a natural gas-fired power plant in Billerica. Another explained how an underground tank at a local elementary school leaked oil down a small incline and onto the property of a local homeowner. The pollutant created a major environmental crisis that required months of costly cleanup.
Crane’s stories often focus on the intersection of technology and industry. For that reason, Green Technology in Boston and other hot spots has become her newest beat.
She recently contributed a series of business profiles to AltEnergyStocks.com, focusing on Smart Grid companies and their potential for growth. Crane envisions a radical transition over the next decade from today’s power grid to one with self-healing capabilities that will present a more secure network to this country.
In addition to her business and technology writing, Crane has written commentary. In 2008, she published her first essay on the Opinion-Editorial page of Newsday, and soon had a handful of essays published on the Boston Globe’s Op-Ed page.
Crane’s objective is to highlight the beauty of the human spirit, underscore moral dilemmas, and explore emotional and philosophical quandaries. She develops her stories around occurrences that usually go unnoticed, transforming a mundane event into a metaphorical journey: a lost watch spurs a memory of grief; a stranded baby crow lures a lonely boy. Links to her essays can be found on her blog: Wordtrope.com/blog.
Crane’s contributions have appeared in the Sunday Globe Magazine, as well as the Globe’s Metro, Business, LivingArts/Lifestyle, and regional sections. She has written for Thomson Reuters, Crain Communications, American Business Journals, and IDG publications. Crane has covered technology, workplace, real estate, lifestyle, and retail industry stories, and she holds an MBA from Suffolk University in Boston, where she was the recipient of a merit-based Marketing Fellowship.
