Jessica Clifford
Jessica Clifford is the newest reporter to join the editorial staff of The Lincoln County News.
Clifford will cover the towns of Alna, Dresden, Edgecomb, Westport Island, Whitefield, and Wiscasset. She will work in collaboration with veteran reporters Charlotte Boynton, in Westport Island and Wiscasset, and Greg Foster, in Dresden and Whitefield.
Clifford is a 2018 graduate of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, where she majored in communication studies and minored in English.
In her junior year of college, she was promoted from staff writer to arts and entertainment editor of her school’s independent student newspaper, The Carolinian. When necessary, she also reported for the news section of the paper.
During her senior year, she interned at the North Carolina regional alt-weekly titled YES! Weekly, for which she received school credit. After completing her internship, Clifford freelanced with the alt-weekly, covering local housing and homelessness issues as well as community events.
She also assisted her professor by writing sections of a city-wide evaluation report on the first cycle of participatory budgeting in Greensboro. Participatory budgeting is a direct form of democracy in which community members vote on projects to be implemented using allocated funds from the city. Greensboro became the first city in the South to begin the annual process. Clifford co-wrote a published academic paper about the evaluation.
Clifford became interested in community journalism after working closely with nonprofits and two newspapers in her college’s town.
She was born in Massachusetts and raised in Pennsylvania.
Now, Clifford is thrilled to move back to New England and begin working at The Lincoln County News.
