Jena Janovy is an award-winning journalist with more than three decades of reporting, writing and editing experience, since 2006 at ESPN leading and producing original digital longform features and multiplatform journalism with partners across the company. She currently leads the News Enterprise Unit, which bridges the Investigative and Enterprise Units, focusing on enterprise journalism and features that spin out of new events. She also pursues high-impact enterprise journalism that drives conversation around the biggest events and cultural moments in women’s sports.

She has won a Peabody Award, a Murrow Award and two Sports Emmys for her work as an editor and coordinating producer of content for ESPN.com. She led the espnW team that produced the “Sister Survivors” roundtable, which received multiple Telly Awards and was part of ESPN’s 2018 Peabody Award for “Spartan Silence.” She has edited multiple stories selected for Best American Sports Writing, and stories written by the 2019 and 2020 recipients of the Dan Jenkins Medal for Excellence in Sportswriting. She was a senior deputy editor for ESPN The Magazine when it received a 2017 National Magazine Award for General Excellence.

Janovy joined ESPN in 2006 and previously co-directed the ESPN Digital & Print Media Enterprise team, establishing vision, strategy, goals, operations, management, structure, personnel and processes for the production of digital and print features, projects and enterprise storytelling. She previously led a team focused on women-centric storytelling for espnW. She is a former member of the ESPN Editorial Board. She was a 2015 fellow in the Punch Sulzberger Leadership Program at Columbia University. She’s a past president of the Omaha Press Club, and a writer and cast member for the Press Club Show and member of the Omaha Press Club Journalism Education Inc. Board. She was a 1992 Fellow at the Knight Center for Specialized Journalism, University of Maryland College of Journalism, studying race, class and ethnicity.

Janovy began her journalism career in 1988 at the Omaha World-Herald. Before joining ESPN, she was an assistant sports editor at the Charlotte Observer, where she managed NFL, NBA and enterprise coverage. Prior to Charlotte, she held reporting and editing positions in metro news and sports at the Omaha World-Herald and the Anniston Star.

A native of Lincoln, Neb., 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 and starter for the women’s basketball team.

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