Award brings an opportunity to share another point of view about me and Delaware Currents

It’s odd being in the spotlight though I was certainly honored to receive a special recognition award from the Upper Delaware Council this past Sunday. Here’s our story about the event.

I knew that the award was coming but I was unprepared for the lovely write-up about me in the program. I figured you’d appreciate getting a bit of the background about me and Delaware Currents. So, here is what Laurie Ramie, the UDC’s executive director, wrote about me:

Nine years ago, Meg McGuire founded an independent online news publication focused solely on the Delaware River, its watershed, and its people.

Delaware Currents has steadily grown in its influence and number of correspondents, largely thanks to Meg’s passion, prose and professional approach to this free, modern news sharing format.

As a native of Rahway, N.J., who ultimately earned a bachelor’s degree at Emerson College in Boston and spent 10 years living in England, Meg discovered her life’s work — journalism — when she was in her early 30s.

She has worked at a variety of community newspapers ranging from weeklies to dailies over her 30-year career. Her last full-time job was managing editor of the Times Herald-Record based in Middletown, N.Y., before she got “down-sized” along with many other journalists.

While working at that job and living in Greenville, N.Y., Meg completed a master’s in Fine Arts degree program with The New School, specializing in poetry, but her goal was to continue reporting.

Thus, Delaware Currents was born in 2015 with a mission that Meg writes, in part, is to offer “powerful, authoritative storytelling that not only speaks truth to power but uses the best writing to speak to the hearts and minds of an audience that spans the four-state watershed. This river belongs to no one and everyone. The river connects us. We are all one watershed.”

Delaware Currents covers it all from light-hearted features to heavy-hitting editorials, flooding to funding, and river issues and activities from its headwaters in the Catskill Mountains to the Delaware Bay heading toward the ocean.

At the June 5 Delaware River Basin Commission meeting held in Narrowsburg, N.Y., Meg proudly debuted a new video that she spent four years working on with The Lenfest Institute for Journalism.

“A Flight Along the Delaware River: Our History, Our Watershed” is a narrated flyover of the entire river with footage from 10+ LightHawk flights and expert consultation. The short film is readily available online.

Meg is a member of the Society of Environmental Journalists, the Institute for Nonprofit News, Local Independent Online News publishers, and news collaboratives in New Jersey and Delaware. 

She was honored as the 2021 Woman of Environmental Media, Marketing and Communications by PennFuture after her persistent reporting was cited as contributing to the formation of a Congressional Delaware River Watershed Caucus.

Meg co-chaired the national conference for the Society of Environmental Journalists held in Philadelphia for more than 1,000 journalists this April. 

She was also a featured speaker at the July 17 digital forum, “Media Narratives on Environmental Justice and the Climate Crisis in 2024,” presented by the Center for Cooperative Media.

She has one daughter and two stepsons with her husband of 14 years, Christopher Mele, with whom she lives in Lords Valley, Pa.

By the way, I’d welcome any requests to come and share the video with any groups, advocacy groups, of course, but also a wider array like Scouts or civic groups or schools. Just reach out and we can set up a date.

And I bet you can guess what’s coming next? How about a helping hand to keep this project going?

Click here to contribute. 

Thanks for reading,

Meg