jennifer jo janisch

Jennifer Jo Janisch is a “one-woman-band” producer and reporter, with a special interest in investigative journalism, especially issues concerning war and armed conflict; national and international security; corruption and criminality; diplomacy; natural resources; immigration and refugees.

She is currently a staff producer at CBS News, producing and shooting original domestic and international stories for the CBS Evening News Weekend Edition.

She was previously a freelance associate producer at the CBS News Foreign Desk, where she worked on international news production for all of the network’s shows, to include “CBS Evening News,” “The Early Show,” “Sunday Morning,” “Face the Nation,” “48 Hours” and “60 Minutes.”

Janisch also reported for CBS Radio News from Jordan, where she covered the protests in Amman in March, 2011.

Before joining CBS News, Janisch associate-produced an hour-long documentary film about the armed conflict in Colombia called “The War We Are Living” for a five-part PBS series entitled “Women, War & Peace.” The film won the Robert Spiers Benjamin Award from the Overseas Press Club for best reporting in any medium on Latin America. The “Women, War, & Peace” series won a Gracie Award for Outstanding Documentary Series, from the Alliance for Women in Media Foundation; the Edward R. Murrow Award for Best TV documentary on international affairs from the Overseas Press Club, and received a Television Academy Honors award, celebrating excellent television “with a conscience.”

Previously, Janisch was a reporter and assistant producer at Voice of America in Washington, D.C., where she scripted and edited television and web packages for the Latin America division (in Spanish). She also often worked as a “one-woman-band,” producing stories which she shot, scripted, narrated, and edited herself. She also worked as a line producer, directing a live evening newscast in Spanish, and wrote anchor intros and questions for Q&A guest segments.

She began her television career in the summer of 2009 as an intern at the CBS News magazine “60 Minutes.” Her first broadcast internship was at WNYC Radio’s “The Leonard Lopate Show,” where she helped produce segments on international news topics, as well as interviews with fiction and non-fiction authors and journalists.

Between 2006-2008, Janisch explored a career in law, working as a paralegal on immigration issues for the chair of the New York Chapter of the American Immigration Lawyers Association; a media paralegal for the firm representing Advance/Newhouse and Condé Nast Publications; and as a Spanish-language translator and interpreter for a criminal law attorney.

Janisch began her journalism career in 2005 as the production manager of San Juan City Magazine in San Juan, Puerto Rico. She was hired after the San Juan Star Newspaper published her English and Spanish accounts of the protests that resulted in the ousting of Ecuador’s president, Lucio Gutiérrez in April of 2005, which took place while she was studying Latin American politics and history at one of South America’s foremost liberal arts universities, the University of San Francisco in Quito.

Janisch holds a master’s degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, where she covered the financial crisis and the ’08 presidential election in print, radio, and television for The Columbia Journalist. She graduated magna cum laude with a degree in Spanish and Latin American studies from the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, where she also took extensive coursework in international relations.

Janisch has lived, traveled, studied, and worked in nearly a dozen Latin American countries, and has also traveled extensively in Europe, the Balkans, and the Middle East. She is fluent in Spanish, proficient in Portuguese, and can read and write Arabic (she is working on the speaking part.) She grew up in Indiana, California, Kentucky, and North Carolina, and currently resides in Brooklyn, N.Y.