Jill Lawrence: On the Campaign Trail

The 2004 presidential election may seem far off but not for USA Today reporter Jill Lawrence. She has tracked every presidential campaign since 1984 and these days is deep into covering prospective candidates and hot topics in the next presidential contest. In contrast to most political reporters who hop on caravans full of journalists on a near yearlong campaign trail, Lawrence professedly refrains from following any one candidate too closely. Instead, she prefers to learn everyone’s story, especially the dissenting voices.

Jill Lawrence followed her journalistic calling post-college graduation. With a bachelor’s degree in music literature from the University of Michigan, Lawrence wanted more from life than reading scores of music. Self-characterized as one who “challenges authority, the hallmark of any journalist,” Lawrence decided to find dissenting voices, “the classic voices that aren’t heard.” So Lawrence returned to her passion from junior high school – reporting – for formal training in the field and enrolled in New York University’s first journalism master’s program in 1976.

Her first job was for United Press International’s Charleston, West Virginia bureau.

It was 1977, Jay Rockefeller had just become West Virginia’s governor, and as a general assignment reporter she covered everything from legislation to AAA baseball. She soon added a bi-weekly feature beat to her reporting repertoire, which granted Lawrence the freedom to “go anywhere in the state as long as I could make it back to the editorial desk within one day.” And she did go everywhere in the state. One day she’d be in Snowshoe profiling the man creating the mountain’s ski resort – now a vacation mainstay – and later in the week she’d be in Moundsville covering the city’s prison.

On the feature beat for UPI, Lawrence wrote her first widely published feature story. “It was about the Hare Krishna community, a religious sect that was an odd fit with the state needless to say, and it went out on the national wire,” said Lawrence. “That night I got a note from the bureau chief saying something like, ‘now your name is made!’”

Relocating to another state capital in 1979, Lawrence joined the Associated Press staff in Harrisburg, Pa. then transferred to Washington with the AP in 1982. In 1984, Lawrence reported on minority political candidates for her first national campaign experience. When pregnant with her second child four years later, Lawrence became the election media writer, commentating on the presidential candidates’ ad campaigns in lieu of traveling on the campaign trail. In her final year on staff before freelancing for magazines and eventually returning to political journalism for USA Today, Lawrence won the National Headliner Award for her AP columns in 1995.

While Lawrence returned to her political roots she also somewhat returned to music – she now sings for with the Washington Choral Ensemble She currently lives in Washington with her husband John Martin, former managing editor of Governing who now runs the magazine’s website, and their two teenage sons. With her sons preparing for college, Lawrence appears to be invested in politics for the long-haul: “It’s seems to be crazy to be doing political reporting for this long,” she said, “but then you get sucked into it and end up realizing what you love about it.”

—Jenna Greditor, ‘G04