ABOUT
Jennifer Oldham is an experienced journalist across platforms. Her award-winning enterprise, narrative and data-driven investigative content sets agendas and gets clicks.
BIO
She's a tenacious idea-driven reporter who helps people and organizations tell their stories, with specific expertise in government, politics, energy, education, aviation and housing.
For decades, freelance journalist Jennifer Oldham has traversed North America to report ground-breaking stories. She donned a beekeeping suit in Utah for a Yale E360 piece and walked southern Colorado’s oldest irrigation ditches for National Geographic. She investigated fire policy for ProPublica and recounted a harrowing rescue for the Washington Post. She documented the pandemic’s life-altering impacts for the Post and the West’s agenda-setting politics for Politico. Oldham uncovered how speculators are eyeing scarce Rocky Mountain water for an award-winning piece in Civil Eats. She edited complex narratives that appeared in the New York Times and on Public Radio International.
As a national correspondent at Bloomberg News, Jennifer Oldham crisscrossed Alaska in a state trooper plane for a Businessweek profile, visited the westernmost point in the United States -- on Kauai -- for this exclusive and tramped through the tick-infested Allegheny National Forest on a hunt for abandoned oil and gas wells. Her willingness to go beyond offices brings stories to life, whether riding straight up Copper Mountain on a snowmobile in the sub-zero, pre-dawn hours to measure snowfall, or spending six days with a long-haul trucker.
In 15 years at the Los Angeles Times, Oldham shared in two Pulitzer Prizes and pioneered the paper’s aviation coverage after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. She traveled to Canada to document the lifelong impacts of another attack at Los Angeles International Airport, was among the first reporters after 9-11 to ride in a cargo jet’s jump seat to chronicle how the federal government was updating its highways in the sky, and rode in a small plane across the Grand Canyon for a page one piece on the lasting effects of among the nation’s first jet accidents.
Jennifer Oldham is an avid runner, skier and yoga enthusiast. Her newest passion is falconry.
2016
She won the National Association of Real Estate Editor's silver award for online reporting for a piece on the real estate crisis in North Dakota's man camps in 2016 and shared an Economic Journalism Award for Excellence in Economic Reporting from the Institute on Political Journalism and a first place citation from the San Francisco Peninsula Press Club in 2013 for the series "America's Great State Payroll Giveaway".
2011
As a freelancer, Jennifer Oldham shared first prize for investigative reporting in 2011 from the Education Writers Association for the USA Today series "Testing the System" as part of a body of work she did for The Hechinger Report. Her stories also appeared in Delta's Sky Magazine, McClatchy Company newspapers and Aol.
1995 - 2004
As a staff writer at the Los Angeles Times, Jennifer Oldham undertook a months-long investigation that documented how defective attic furnaces caused scores of fires, prompting the Consumer Product Safety Commission to recall 30,000 of the appliances. She wrote more than 1,000 stories in her 15 years at the newspaper, pioneered coverage of Los Angeles International Airport, including a series of stories that led to the reconstruction of runways on the facility's south side and shared in Pulitzer Prizes in 2004 and 1995 for coverage of devastating urban fires and the Northridge earthquake.