Mandy Jenkins, a digital news leader who previously worked at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, died Sunday, Feb. 26, in Zanesville, Ohio, after nearly four years of cancer treatment. She was 42.
Jenkins was born August 16, 1980, in Aurora, Colorado, to Roddy Jenkins and Anita Clark. She was raised in Zanesville and graduated from West Muskingum High School in 1998. She earned a bachelor’s and master’s degree from Kent State, where she met her future husband, Ben Fischer.
She most recently worked as Head of Product at Factal, a breaking news technology company, and previously served as General Manager at The Compass Experiment, a partnership between Google and McClatchy to explore sustainable business models for local news, wrote Carrie Blazina for the Online News Association. Jenkins served eight years on the ONA Board, including a term as president from 2018-19.
Prior to her work with Compass, Jenkins was a 2019 John S. Knight journalism fellow at Stanford University and served in leadership roles at Storyful and Digital First Media’s Project Thunderdome. She drove digital journalism project at several news organizations, including The Huffington Post, TBD.com, The Cincinnati Enquirer and the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, where she served as a news producer from August 2004 to March 2007.
A memorial service will be held at 1 p.m. Sunday, March 5, at Meadow Farm Church, 6015 Coopermill Road, Zanesville. Friends are also planning a celebration of life in New York City in the coming months.
Memorial donations can be made to the Breast Cancer Research Foundation via GoFundMe. Jenkins donated her body to the Ohio State College of Medicine for research.
