Jena Janovy oversees the enterprise and investigations unit at ESPN.com, where she plans, assigns, edits and produces online stories and long-form cross-platform features in collaboration with “Outside the Lines,” “E:60” and ESPN The Magazine. She has won two Sports Emmys and been nominated for four additional Sports Emmys for her work as coordinating producer of content for ESPN.com. She is a member of the ESPN Editorial Board.
Jena started her journalism career in 1988 as a summer intern at The Omaha World-Herald. Since then, she’s spent nearly 25 years in newspaper and online journalism. Before joining ESPN in 2006, she was an assistant sports editor at The Charlotte Observer, where she coordinated the NFL, NBA and enterprise coverage and oversaw the night sports desk. She also spent a year as the Charlotte 49ers men’s and women’s basketball beat writer. Prior to Charlotte, she held several reporting and editing positions in news and sports at The Omaha World-Herald. She also spent a year and a half as a reporter at The Anniston Star.
Jena is a member of the Association for Women in Sports Media and the Online News Association. She’s a past president of the Omaha Press Club, where she was chairwoman of publications, education and finance committees, a writer and cast member for the Press Club Show and member of the Omaha Press Club Journalism Education Inc. board of directors. She was a 1992 Fellow at the Knight Center for Specialized Journalism, University of Maryland College of Journalism, studying race, class and ethnicity.
Jena is an instructor at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, where she teaches a senior-level course on Issues in Sports Journalism (spring semester, 2012 and 2013). She holds a Master of Science degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and a Bachelor of Arts degree in political science from the University of Nebraska at Omaha, where she was a captain of the women’s basketball team. She lives in West Hartford, Conn.
