Jennifer Nelson
Jennifer Nelson serves as the Reporters Committee’s director of pre-publication review & journalist support. She leads the organization’s pre-publication and pre-broadcast review practice, oversees the publication of and updates to its 200+ legal guides, supervises its legal hotline for journalists, and directs its newsroom legal training program.
Jen has extensive experience counseling journalists and newsrooms through pre-publication review for stories in print, on air, and in podcasts, advising some through years-long investigations. She has guided independent documentary filmmakers through pre-broadcast review for projects that went on to premiere at major international film festivals, including Sundance Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival, Venice International Film Festival, Berlin International Film Festival (Berlinale), South by Southwest Film & TV Festival (SXSW), and Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival.
She also regularly drafts and delivers newsroom trainings on newsgathering, defamation, physical and digital security, police interaction, source protection, and other legal issues. Her reach is extensive, with more than 700 journalists receiving legal training in 2024 alone.
Jen manages a team of legal fellows and staff attorneys who respond to the Reporters Committee’s legal hotline for journalists, which assists journalists with a wide variety of media law and press freedom issues.
In addition to her newsroom counseling experience, Jen is a seasoned media litigator. Since joining the Reporters Committee as a media litigation fellow in 2017, she has represented news organizations and journalists in public records, court access, subpoena defense, and defamation defense matters in federal and state courts, and has drafted amicus briefs and letters advancing press-freedom interests before federal appellate courts.
Jen is also a former lecturer and co-director of the First Amendment Clinic at the University of Virginia School of Law, where she developed a docket of litigation and amicus matters and lectured law students on current topics in media and First Amendment law.
Prior to joining the Reporters Committee, Jen was a litigation associate in the Washington, D.C. office of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP, where her practice focused on complex litigation and congressional investigations. Before law school, she covered breaking news for the City & Region section as an editorial assistant and freelance reporter for The Boston Globe. During her tenure, she investigated and co-authored a front page, 3,000-word investigative report on restaurant health inspection practices in Boston.
Jen earned her J.D. from the University of Virginia School of Law in 2011, where she was a managing editor of the Virginia Journal of International Law. During law school, she traveled to Egypt as a Cowan Human Rights Fellow to research government-imposed restrictions on journalists, bloggers, and social media activists. Jen earned her bachelor’s degree in journalism from Northeastern University in 2007.
She resides in Washington, D.C. with her husband, son, and Shetland Sheepdog.
Licensed to practice law in New York, Virginia, and Washington, D.C.