Former homepage producer for The Washington Post's Web site and later editor of its religion Web site, On Faith, Jeannine Hunter is a former innovation specialist at a federal tech startup, an online journalist and a former religion reporter.
Prior to working in the federal government, she worked for a children's hospital and at The Washington Post. Prior to working at The Post, she served for more than a decade as a reporter who covered religious communities, institutions and issues facing them. She has covered myriad of governance and social issues arising within the Southern Baptist Convention; the Roman Catholic Church, the nation’s largest religious body; the Episcopal Church U.S.A., one of its oldest; and younger faith communities including Baha’i and non-theists.
She has covered how faith communities- local congregations, parachurch organizations and national offices - mobilized relief workers for deployment to the Gulf Coast immediately after Hurricane Katrina, which subsequently prompted her to train and volunteer in American Red Cross disaster relief operations.
The Harlem, New York native, who was also raised in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., worked for a television station in Nashville, the Tennessean newspaper as a religion and community reporter as well as the News Sentinel in Knoxville for close to 6 ½ years where she was lead religion reporter who managed its faith section and coverage.
For her work, Hunter has won awards including two Golden Press Card Awards of Excellence, one of the highest honors awarded by the East Tennessee Society of Professional Journalists, and best Web site award in 2007 and 2008 from the Tennessee Associated Press Broadcasters for creating/managing content for the Web site of Nashville’s CBS affiliate. In 2005, she examined the religious response to HIV/AIDS, particularly in southern Appalachia, as part of a multimedia journalism project that garnered third place in a national contest sponsored by the Association of Health Care Journalists, based at the Missouri School of Journalism. The project was supported by Kaiser Family Foundation fellowship.
She started her reporting career at The Sun News in Myrtle Beach, S.C., after graduating from Johnson C. Smith University in Charlotte, N.C., with a degree in communication arts with a concentration in international studies. As an undergraduate student, she studied HIV/AIDS awareness and race relations in Great Britain during one summer and Russian culture, language and media in Moscow a portion of her junior year.
She also holds a master’s degree in information sciences from the University of Tennessee with assistance from a grant from the federal agency Institute of Museum and Library Services. She has always had a heart for covering various cultures and religious communities, initially influenced by growing up in a culturally and religiously diverse household/community and deepened through her travels and studies.
