Tovia Smith is an award-winning NPR National Correspondent based in Boston, who's spent more than three decades covering news around New England and beyond.
Most recently, she's reported on the pandemic and its fallout, and she has also reported extensively on the #MeToo movement and on the world of higher education.
Smith has extensive experience covering breaking news, including the Newtown school shooting, the Boston Marathon bombing and subsequent trial, as well as the capture and trial of Boston mobster James "Whitey" Bulger. She's provided coverage of the gay marriage fight in MA, and the sexual abuse scandal in the Catholic Church, including breaking the news of the Pope's secret meeting with survivors.
Throughout the years, Smith has brought to air the distinct voices of Boston area residents, whether those demanding the ouster of Cardinal Bernard Law, or those mourning the death of U.S. Senator Ted Kennedy. In her reporting on contentious issues like race relations, abortion, and juvenile crime, her reporting pushes past the polemics, and advances the national conversation with thoughtful, nuanced arguments from all sides.
Smith has reported on seven consecutive New Hampshire Primary elections, the BP oil spill, and the Sept. 11 attacks. She has gone behind prison bars to interview female prisoners who keep their babies with them, and behind closed doors to watch a college admissions committee decide whom to admit. She embedded in a local orphanage to tell the stories of the children living there.
Smith has also chronicled such personal tales as a woman's battle against obesity and family businesses struggling to survive the recession of 2008, and the pandemic of 2020.
Throughout her career, Smith has won dozens of national journalism awards including a Gracie, the Casey Medal, the Unity Award, a Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award Honorable Mention, and numerous honors from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Public Radio News Directors Association, and the Associated Press.
Smith took a leave of absence from NPR in 1998 to help create and launch Here and Now, a daily news magazine co-produced by NPR and WBUR in Boston. As co-host of the program, she conducted live interviews on issues ranging from the impeachment of President Bill Clinton to allegations of sexual abuse in Massachusetts prisons.
In 1996, Smith worked as a radio consultant and journalism instructor in Africa. She spent several months teaching and reporting in Ethiopia, Guinea, and Tunisia. She filed her first stories as an intern and then reporter for local affiliate WBUR in Boston beginning in 1987.
She is a graduate of Tufts University, with a degree in international relations, and a proud alum of the second cohort of the EPIIC program in 1986-7.
Quite simply, EPIIC taught me more than any other book, class or professor I’d ever encountered. I didn’t quite know it when I signed up for the program, but EPIIC was a lesson not only in politics and history, but also in morality, the search for “truth,” and personal leadership. And it prepared me for a life-long career in journalism.
One of my assignments was to help edit what we called “The Briefing Book:” a compilation of writings, news articles and essays on the Palestinian - Israeli conflict that would serve as background to those who would attend our Symposium. Knowing how difficult it would be to compose an historical narrative of the disputed region, we endeavored to create an “objective” timeline. But even there, our little committee of Israelis, Jews, Palestinians and Protestants haggled for hours about which events belonged in our “true” record of the past, and how far back in history our timeline should begin. In the end, we opted to omit the timeline, and instead printed an excerpt from E.H. Carr’s “What is History?”
“In the first place, the facts of history never come to us as “pure,” since they do not and cannot exist in a pure form: they are always refracted through the mind of the recorder... The facts...are like fish swimming about in a vast...ocean; and what the historian catches will depend partly on chance, but mainly on what part of the ocean he chooses to fish in.”
This lesson still guides me every day. As a journalist, I find myself constantly straining to see a situation from another perspective. And I’m constantly challenging opposing parties to answer each other’s grievance.