Editorial page chief Peter Canellos is leaving Globe

Peter Canellos, editor of The Boston Globe’s editorial page since 2009, said he will step down following a 26-year career at the newspaper.

Canellos’s tenure at the Globe has included positions as Metro editor and chief of the newspaper’s Washington, D.C., bureau, where he directed coverage of the 2004 and 2008 presidential elections as well as of the insurgency in Iraq.

The Washington bureau won numerous awards on Canellos’s watch, including the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting.

A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, with a law degree from Columbia University, Canellos in 2011 won a distinguished writing award from the American Society of News Editors. He also oversaw development of the Globe’s best-selling biography “Last Lion: The Fall and Rise of Ted Kennedy,” which was a New York Times bestseller.

“Peter is a singular talent, and we are extraordinarily thankful for the years he devoted to the Globe,” said John Henry, the Globe’s owner and publisher. “He is a master storyteller, deep thinker, and adept communicator.”

Henry named the Globe’s Ellen Clegg as interim editorial page editor while a search is conducted for Canellos’s replacement. Clegg, a veteran of the Globe newsroom, has been serving as executive director of communication and president of the Globe Foundation. She has previously worked as deputy managing editor for news operations and for The Boston Sunday Globe, as well as assistant managing editor for regional news and other roles.

After 30 years at the Globe, Clegg left in 2009 to become a science writer at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, before returning in 2012.

She is the author of “ChemoBrain,” which was named consumer health book of the year by the American Journal of Nursing. She is also coauthor of “The Alzheimer’s Solution.”

Henry said the Globe will continue to challenge convention and to rethink the presentation of its opinion and editorial pages for a digital audience.

“Our content, whether news, sports, entertainment, or editorial, must be presented in formats that engage the broadest range of readers, wherever they are in the world and however they are reading the Globe,” he said.