John R. Ellement
John R. Ellement is a veteran digital journalist at the Boston Globe whose work spans fast-moving criminal justice coverage and detailed residential real estate profiles, unified by a clear, fact-driven reporting style. He works on the express desk handling breaking news while maintaining a long-standing focus on courts, policing, and public safety incidents, and he is a regular author of Boston.com’s Home of the Week feature in the Globe’s Address real estate section. Across these assignments, his distinguishing trait is the way he combines decades of criminal justice reporting experience with meticulous attention to the specifications and setting of individual homes.
Breaking news and criminal justice coverage
Ellement has more than 30 years of experience as an online journalist covering breaking news, with criminal justice issues identified as his primary area of expertise at the Globe. Over his tenure he has served as the paper’s primary state court reporter and has covered the city’s police beat, building deep familiarity with legal processes, law enforcement, and the way public agencies communicate in crisis. He was part of the Boston Globe’s coverage of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, work that was recognized with a Pulitzer Prize for breaking news coverage, underscoring his role in major, high-pressure stories.
His current Metro bylines show him working at speed on public safety and legal stories, often tied to specific incidents and charges.
Recent pieces include coverage of a shelter-in-place order at Harvard University after a reported threat, with his reporting tracking the initial emergency alert, subsequent police response, and eventual arrest that resolved the situation. Other articles follow the arc of criminal cases, such as a corrections officer accused of smuggling drugs and a cellphone into a facility, a federal agent charged with assaulting a juvenile girl, and a suspect in a stabbing near North Station ordered held, each framed around the charges, court decisions, and official statements.
He also reports on political figures facing legal scrutiny, as in a story about the mayor of Lawrence declaring he will not resign despite facing state and federal charges, where he focuses on the intersection of legal jeopardy and public office.
Across these news stories, Ellement’s writing is direct and procedural: he organizes copy around who was involved, what charges or orders were issued, which agencies were in charge, and how events unfolded over time. The coverage reads like a reliable record of key facts and institutional actions, reflecting his longstanding familiarity with courts, police, and emergency operations.
Home of the Week and residential listings
Alongside his breaking-news work, Ellement frequently writes Home of the Week features for the Globe’s Address section and Boston.com’s real estate coverage. These stories profile individual properties in detail, combining real estate fundamentals with descriptive narrative about the home’s setting and lifestyle appeal. His recent Home of the Week pieces span a wide range of locations and price points, from a log cabin “retreat” in the Berkshires, to a furnished beach house in Wells, Maine with three living spaces, to a riverfront bungalow in Merrimac with a private beach, and a contemporary home in Boxborough designed to maximize sunlight from floor-to-ceiling windows.
In these features, Ellement consistently foregrounds hard numbers and specifications: each story lists the property’s full address, list price, architectural style, year built, square footage, bedroom and bathroom counts, sewer and water arrangements, and current tax bill. He then layers in concise contextual detail about the site, whether it is a wooded lot at the foot of the Berkshire Hills, a beachside street near the ocean, a sloping parcel on the Merrimack River with kayak and boating access, or a suburban parcel where the house’s design responds to light and views. When relevant, he notes listing agents and the status of offers, and he often includes a call for readers or brokers to submit additional listings, signaling an ongoing pipeline of properties and an open channel to the local real estate community.
Where some real estate coverage leans heavily on lifestyle language, Ellement’s Home of the Week pieces stay grounded in the mechanics of the property - how it is laid out, what kinds of spaces and systems it offers, and how the site’s geography shapes the experience of living there. The result is a format that serves both as a feature story and as a thorough briefing for anyone evaluating a listing, with enough technical detail to support serious interest.
From courts to properties: a consistent reporting style
Ellement’s work across breaking news and residential real estate shares a common structure: a focus on verifiable facts, clear chronology, and institutional context. In criminal justice and public safety stories, that means tracking arrests, charges, shelter-in-place orders, and legal decisions, and explaining how police, prosecutors, and public officials are responding.
In Home of the Week features, the same discipline appears in the way he organizes a property’s data, from fundamentals like price and square footage to utilities and taxes, before turning to what the home’s layout and location mean in practice.
His professional history reinforces this dual focus: long service at the Globe, deep experience on the court and police beats, and a role as a primary author for the Address section’s showcase property feature. Earlier work for a news service providing state-specific coverage to multiple newspapers shows he is comfortable tailoring reporting to the needs of particular audiences while remaining anchored in official records and hard facts.
Taken together, Ellement’s portfolio reflects a reporter who combines the reflexes of a breaking-news journalist with the methodical, detail-oriented approach of a real estate specialist.
4 more real estate journalists.
Aaron Elstein
Aaron Elstein brings a Wall Street reporter’s eye to commercial real estate. He is a senior reporter at Crain’s New York Business, where he covers large office towers, Midtown corridors, landlords, lenders, investors and regulators. His reporting shows how ownership decisions, bank balance sheets, capital markets and regulation shape property values and risk. He also covers banking, finance and Wall Street, including bank mergers and investment firms. Before joining Crain’s in 2003, he wrote Heard on the Street columns for The Wall Street Journal and covered bank mergers for American Banker. Elstein reports by closely reading footnotes, contracts, regulatory filings and legal documents. His investigative work has examined executive payments, pension funds, tax enforcement and tenant harassment. His coverage places deals, disputes and enforcement actions within broader financial and property cycles.
Aaron Moselle
Aaron Moselle covers housing and community development for WHYY’s PlanPhilly, filing for radio and the web. He stands out for connecting market data and government action to displacement, affordable homes, and the daily questions facing renters and homeowners. His core beat is housing affordability and market strain, including high mortgage rates, rising prices, tax assessments, and what they mean for buyers, sellers, and renters. He also reports on preserving and creating affordable housing, neighborhood rehab efforts, major real estate deals, and the effect of property sales on residents. His work often uses direct sourcing, plain language, and service journalism to make policy and finance clear.
Aarthi Swaminathan
Aarthi Swaminathan is a personal finance reporter at MarketWatch whose distinctive beat connects residential real estate with household budgets. She covers housing prices, affordability, mortgage rates, financing, insurance, remodeling and the costs of owning a home. Her reporting examines overvalued and fast-rising markets, ZIP-code trends, second-home sellers, builders, developers and buyers facing higher borrowing costs. She also follows Gen Z buyers, owners trapped in weakening condo markets and neighborhood conflicts over development. Her work pairs data-driven housing analysis with detailed case studies of buyers, owners and sellers. She explains complex market data in clear, accessible language and writes news features, personal-finance explainers, Economic Report stories, The Big Move and New American Playbook. She won a silver award for Best Collection of Work by an Individual Covering Residential Real Estate.
Abbey Ferguson
Abbey Ferguson stands out for reporting how major commercial moves and redevelopment plans reshape the built environment, especially the real estate deals that reveal what land and retail space are worth. She covers Central Texas commercial real estate and development for KWTX, with recent stories on land valuation, major transactions, retail redevelopment, and infrastructure planning. Her work has tracked an $80 million data center site offer in Hill County, a prospective Trader Joe’s location in Waco, and a planning project using artificial intelligence to predict traffic patterns. She writes as a news reporter, staying close to the numbers, public records, brokers, officials, and landowners. Her stories turn contract prices, appraisal data, and listing history into plain explanations of what buyers are betting on and how those deals affect surrounding property owners and nearby businesses.