Jackie Spinner, Reporter, Washington Post

Jackie Spinner covers accounting policy for the Financial news section of The Washington Post, where has been a staff writer since 1995. She came to the Post as summer intern. Her first official assignment was to help open the Southern Maryland bureau, a rural outpost in those days with just two reporters. It now has its own editor and a half-dozen reporters. But during the Blizzard of '96, Jackie and her colleague were on their own to shovel the bureau parking lot. They also took out their own garbage and drove the recycling to the county dump. She was delivered from Southern Maryland by the infamous Army sex scandal, which required her to spend several months in Aberdeen, north of Baltimore, covering the trials of seven drill sergeants accused of raping their privates. She spent three months writing a piece on drill sergeants for the Sunday magazine. That assignment took her to boot camp in Aberdeen, Fort Jackson (S.C.) and Fort Benning (Ga.), where she fired her first M-16. After the Army, Jackie spent about 2 1/2 years covering Prince George's County government in Maryland. In 2000, she returned to the Financial desk to cover commercial real estate. She began focusing on insurance issues after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and then on accounting reform after the Enron Corp. implosion. She now covers accounting policy, including the Financial Accounting Standards Board. Her speciality is finding interesting but arcance topics and then convincing her editors that there is a reader out there who would care. Those subjects have included weather derivatives, special purpose entities and business combinations. Since the war in Iraq, she has been detailed to cover reconstruction contracts. More people are reading her stories now. Jackie also contributes to the Travel and Food sections of the Washington Post. She grew up in Decatur, Ill., the soybean capital of the world. Jackie has a bachelor's in journalism from Southern Illinois University (summa cum laude and valedictorian) and a master's from the University of California at Berkeley. Although the Post was her first "real job," she also has worked--not always for money--at the San Diego Union-Tribune, the Oakland Tribune and the Decatur (Ill.) Herald & Review. Jackie is a member of the Journalism and Women's Symposium and currently serves as the group's newsletter editor. She also participates in the Washington Post's high school journalism development program, and is the team leader at Cardozo High School. She was a media fellow at Duke University fellowship in the fall of 2002.