Jane Ellen Stevens

1948 - 2025

Jane Ellen Stevens
08/23/1948 - 11/30/2025
Jane Ellen Stevens, a groundbreaking journalist, world traveler, great friend and cat lover, died in Gualala, Calif., on Nov. 30 after a long battle with brain cancer. She beat the odds for many years before it finally got her.
Jane was born in New Jersey in 1948 to Francis Stevens and Genevieve Wisniewski. Her father was in the military and Jane had a well-stamped passport in her very early years. When her parents divorced, Jane and her mother returned to the U.S. and landed in Lexington, Kentucky, where Jane grew up.
She graduated from the University of Kentucky with a degree in zoology and then attended the University of Miami to study marine biology. She found her calling as a writer, switched gears and earned an M.A. in communications from the University of Georgia. She began working at the Boston Globe as a copy editor, and then moved on to the San Francisco Examiner, where she worked as an assistant foreign/national editor, marketing columnist, magazine writer and science and technology reporter.
Always ahead of the curve, in the early 1980s she wrote one of the first computer technology columns in the country. But her interests were wide-ranging and her work at the Examiner included first-person stories on race-car driving and performing as a Raiderette cheerleader for the Oakland Raiders.
In 1988, she left newspapers and founded GlobalQuest Feature Service, a syndicated science and technology feature service. The service provided articles to 20 newspapers around the world, ranging from the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post and the Boston Globe to the Singapore Straits Times, the London Times, and Asahi Shimbun's weekly magazine in Japan.
For four years, she lived and worked in Kenya and Indonesia, where she continued to report on science and technology. She traveled extensively, doing science reporting in Southeast Asia, Central and South America, and Russia. She went to Antarctica three times in the winter aboard icebreakers to explore the Antarctic sea ice ecosystem. Her writing appeared in magazines ranging from National Geographic to Vogue.
She later became a digital and video journalist. As a consultant, she worked with many news organizations making a transition from traditional print, radio or TV to digital news.
Her video work, for the New York Times and then for Discovery Channel's website, included a project with Discovery that focused on violence prevention. For several years, she specialized in violence epidemiology. She co-founded the Reporting on Violence Project with Berkeley Media Studies Group, which encouraged news organizations to modernize crime reporting by adding a scientific and prevention, public health perspective.
As an associate faculty member at the Knight Digital Media Center at the University of California at Berkeley, she helped develop the school's first online multimedia reporting tutorials, which were used by reporters around the world. She later taught at the journalism schools at the University of Missouri and the University of Kansas.
In late 2011 she returned to her home base in Yolo County, Calif. to launch ACEs Connection. For the rest of her life, her work was focused on spreading the word about the lifelong impact of childhood trauma on adults and the significant difference that positive experiences can have in terms of healing. For her work in the PACEs (Positive and Adverse Childhood Experiences) movement, Jane received the Academy on Violence & Abuse 2019 Change Maker Award and the Community Resilience Initiative 2019 Resilience Champion.
In her spare time, Jane managed to get her pilot's license. She also dabbled in marriage several times before realizing that she really preferred living alone with her beloved cats, sometimes as many as seven.
Jane's friends will gather to remember her sometime next year. In the meantime, donations can be made in her honor to The Institute for Nonprofit News.