Mary Hennigan to join Arkansas Advocate reporting team

Mary Hennigan

Award-winning journalist Mary Hennigan will join the Arkansas Advocate team on April 29.

Hennigan, 25, has been a reporter for the Arkansas Times since June 2022 and currently covers Little Rock city government among other topics.

Hennigan will focus her reporting for the Advocate on women’s issues, housing policy and energy and the environment. Other Advocate team members focus on education, health care, prisons, and laws and policies affecting low-income and LGBTQ+ people.

“I love local journalism, and I’m excited to continue doing it in a different capacity,” Hennigan said.

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As a student at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, in 2021, Hennigan was part of a collaborative project that won several national awards in 2022, including an IRE Medal from Investigative Reporters & Editors, the Online Journalism Association, the News Leaders Association and the Society of Professional Journalists.

The project, “Printing Hate,” involved 60 students across seven university campuses and was led by the Howard Center for Investigative Journalism at the University of Maryland. With the center’s guidance, students built a database of past news coverage of Black Americans to help future generations understand the role the press often played in the perpetration and perpetuation of racial violence.

IRE judges wrote this about the project: “As the mainstream media reckons with its racist past, this collaborative project went well beyond any of those efforts to show the complicity of newspapers in race-based violence by creating a permanent archive of the very hate-filled pages. In an interactive database and presentation and through more than a dozen stories of the lives lost, this effort ensures that this history is not tucked away in an archive and forgotten.”

Hennigan contributed a deeply researched article about a little-known 1904 lynching in St. Charles, Arkansas, to the project.

During the 2020-2021 pandemic, Hennigan worked as a reporter and assistant editor with arkansascovid.com, a daily online data and information source about the disease and its impact on Arkansans. The blog used data visualization to inform its 13,000 followers in English, Spanish and Marshallese.

Advocate Editor-in-Chief Sonny Albarado said he is “immensely pleased to have someone as talented and versatile as Mary join our team.”

Hennigan graduated from the University of Arkansas with a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in journalism. She lives in Little Rock. 

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