Mandy Jenkins, digital news pioneer who founded Mahoning Matters, dies at age 42
Mandy Jenkins, who founded Mahoning Matters, died Sunday. She was 42.
Jenkins died in her hometown of Zanesville, Ohio, after four years of cancer treatment.
She received bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Kent State University and began her career with a WKSU fellowship in 2004.
Jenkins showcased her social media and digital strategies in newsrooms from New York City to Washington, D.C. to California to Ohio, where she founded Mahoning Matters in 2019.
She is survived by her husband of 14 years, Ben Fischer.
As general manager of The Compass Experiment, an initiative from Google and McClatchy that focused on finding sustainable business models for local news, Jenkins started Mahoning Matters in Youngstown, making the city the site of the project’s first local news startup. The second was The Longmont Leader in Colorado.
In 2019, when writing about launching a new local news startup in Mahoning County, Jenkins wrote: “... I dreamed of opening a new news provider in my home state. While our accents are a little different, Youngstown is not all that different from my hometown of Zanesville, which is about 100 miles southwest, as the crow flies.”
Friends and colleagues noted her passion for local news.
“Local news is where I started my career and I feel it is the bedrock of our industry’s connection with the audience,” Jenkins wrote prior to launching Mahoning Matters. “Local news tells their stories, lives in their communities and earns their trust through the kind of accountability that comes when you might run into your area reporter at the grocery store.”
Jenkins served eight years on the board of the Online News Association (including two years as board president) and helped create the nonprofit’s Women’s Leadership Accelerator, according to her obituary.
“Mandy spent more than two decades as a journalist and newsroom leader,” said a GoFundMe page set up for Jenkins that is now raising funds for breast cancer research to honor her. “She was a pioneer in digital media and helped newsrooms adapt for the digital age, developing strategies for online news presentation, finding new audiences with social media, and using the internet for reporting. She was a beloved mentor and editor who was enthusiastic about helping others in their careers.
“She had a thirst for the world and knowledge that was unrivaled. Mandy traveled extensively, visiting at least 35 countries and all 50 states. Her most notable trips include the Olympics in Brazil and South Korea, hiking the Annapurna Trail in Nepal, a safari in Kenya, and trips to Russia, Latvia, Egypt and India to train fellow journalists.”
A memorial service is set for 1 p.m. March 5 at Meadow Farm Church, 6015 Coopermill Rd. in Zanesville. The Breast Cancer Research Foundation will receive memorial donations made to her GoFundMe.