Jackie Winchester

Jackie Winchester has been in journalism for nearly 25 years, most recently as an associate editor at Newsweek before she joined State Affairs.

Her love of journalism started in her Oklahoma high school when she signed up for the student newspaper as an extracurricular. The rest is history, as it led to a career that spans newspapers, local and national TV, and magazines, mostly on the digital side. As a breaking news and general assignment reporter at Gannett-owned The News-Press in Fort Myers, Florida, where she has lived since 2000, she covered everything from crime scenes to city hall meetings to presidential visits. She has had bylines in USA Today and other Gannett-owned papers. While living in Southwest Florida, Jackie has produced the news through many hurricanes, and her crowdsourcing work at The News-Press during Hurricane Charley in 2004 helped her digital team garner special consideration from the Pulitzer Prize committee.

Jackie has extensive experience in digital news and truly enjoys crafting headlines, editing and producing stories, and breaking news ahead of the competition. With her career in digital news having begun shortly after the internet went mainstream, she has helped grow news websites and spearheaded multimedia and social media campaigns. A weeklong fellowship at the University of California-Berkeley afforded her the opportunity to learn even more about digital storytelling, and she took those ideas back to the newsroom to teach her colleagues the best way to present news to readers.

Jackie enjoys reading, watching documentaries, taking day trips, and hanging out with her family and two chihuahuas in her spare time.