Region 3 Director Jessica Durkin is a freelance journalist based in Scranton, Pa. Jessica was a full-time, daily newspaper reporter for five years before she was laid off in April from the Scranton Times-Tribune, where she worked on the night cops desk.

Jessica graduated with a bachelor’s degree in communications-journalism from Cal Poly Pomona university and soon after started her journalism career when she was awarded a minority internship for the summer at the Portland Press-Herald newspaper in Maine. 

From there, Jessica was hired at the Norwich Bulletin, a former Gannett paper in eastern Connecticut, and covered the two largest Indian casinos in the world, Foxwoods and Mohegan Sun, as well as the respective tribes that ran them. Before leaving the Bulletin, Jessica covered several municipalities in the paper’s coverage area. She was also among a team of reporters to cover the first execution in 45 years of an inmate on Connecticut’s death row.

In Scranton, Jessica was assigned to cover five municipalities in Lackawanna County, where she wrote about a controversial high school project, the resignation of a borough manager and eventually numerous breaking crime and fire stories upon moving to the police desk.

Jessica recently began cataloging independant, online news start-ups and lists them in her blog at at www.inothernews.us. The site aims to chronicle what citizen journalists or laid off news people are doing to replace lost coverage with shrinking legacy media.